tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24388438199273336732018-01-15T08:45:44.492-08:00Michael GlackinMichael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.comBlogger99125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-71054904776985820942017-12-06T02:28:00.000-08:002017-12-06T02:28:40.648-08:00The U.S.-U.K. special relationship? It’s complicatedBy Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star <br />Wednesday, December 6 2017<br /><br />It’s hard to ignore Donald Trump on Twitter. But I find it well worth the effort. Why? Because, the U.S. president uses Twitter as a highly effective way of diverting scrutiny away from what his administration is actually doing.<br />In case you missed it, earlier this month Trump pulled the U.S. out of the United Nations’ ambitious plan to establish a global approach to migration, on the basis that the process – which involves a very loose agreement to resettle migrants and provide access to education and jobs – interferes with “American sovereignty.”<br />Displaced people fleeing armed conflict and economic distress is arguably the biggest issue facing Western governments.<br />The failure of the West to offer a coordinated response to migration pressures has destabilized the political order across Europe, fueling support for far-right undemocratic parties.<br />Yet, politicians and media instead focused their attention on the erstwhile leader of the free world’s decision to retweet three inflammatory videos from a woman called Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of a small fringe U.K. racist group called Britain First.<br />The unverified videos purported to depict Islamic violence. Trump’s apparent endorsement gave the group more publicity than it could ever have dreamed.<br />U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s deliberately timid response to Trump’s late night Twitter action – that he was “wrong” to retweet the videos – was purposely designed not to offend the thinskinned president as she came under intense political pressure to vigorously condemn his actions.<br />Of course, British prime ministers are obsequiously paranoid about maintaining the so-called “special relationship” with America’s presidents. But on top of the traditional paranoia, May is still desperately seeking to clinch a trade deal with the Trump administration to cushion the economic impact of the U.K.’s decision to leave the European Union – Brexit, the issue that is dominating U.K. politics.<br />Unfortunately May’s mild rebuke drew a blistering retort from the Hair Furer, who tweeted: “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”<br />Well, as everyone now knows, Trump couldn’t even manage to sin effectively, and instead of venting his anger at the prime minister, sent his response to a house wife with the same name in the sleepy seaside town of Bognor Regis, in Sussex, and her six Twitter followers.<br />And this is the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Makes you think doesn’t it? The Britain First retweets mark a new low in Trump’s odious behavior. Yet is anyone really surprised? Trump’s crude pandering to his political base at home is far more important to him than any ally abroad. But is there also some other method in his madness?<br />It’s worth remembering Trump is unhappy with the U.K.’s opposition to his desire to scrap the Iran nuclear deal.<br />Speaking in Jordan at the end of her whistle-stop tour of the Middle East last week, May again, albeit gently, challenged Trump’s desire to wreck the agreement.<br />During a speech in Amman, she described the deal – brokered by the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, China and Germany – as “a major step toward ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program is not diverted for military purposes” and added that it was “vitally important for our shared security.”<br />The president’s principal allies in dismantling the deal, indeed the two countries that appear to be informing what passes for the president’s Middle East policy, are Saudi Arabia and Israel. I can’t recall any Trump tweets that have criticized Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, or Saudi Arabia’s King Salman or his son and de facto ruler of the kingdom, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.<br />In a nod to Tehran’s regional expansion in Yemen, May also warned that more needed to be done to “strengthen our response to Iran’s ballistic missile program,” something she was no doubt made painfully aware of when she held talks with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad a few days earlier and discussed the war in Yemen. May, whose government no longer commands its own majority in Parliament, is under increasing pressure from opposition parties to stop U.K. arms sales to Saudi Arabia as the humanitarian disaster the war in Yemen has caused worsens.<br />The U.K. has licensed over $6 billion worth of arms sales to the kingdom since the war in Yemen began.<br />As trading partners are at a premium for the U.K. right now, the arms deals are safe, so long as May’s government remains in power. These days the U.K. isn’t in a position to dictate its views to anyone. However, May’s officials insisted she told King Salman and his son that the Arab-led coalition fighting Shiite Houthi rebels must fully lift its sea and air blockade on the port of Hudaida, which has intensified the suffering of Yemen’s civilian population.<br />Domestically, the twitter spat has increased pressure on May to cancel Trump’s planned state visit to the U.K. next year. The invitation, made almost immediately after Trump was sworn in as president, includes dinner with the queen, and a parade in gilded horse-drawn carriages for Trump and his wife. It was supposed to be a tool to lever favor with Trump and boost the prospect of a postBrexit free trade agreement with the U.S.<br />Unfortunately it now appears to have broken in May’s hand, or more accurately in Trump’s thumbs.<br />Yet despite May’s attempts to cozy up to him in the last year, before the Twitter row blew up, she has absolutely nothing to show for it.<br />For all Trump’s promises of a “very big and exciting” trade deal, and pledges from pro-Brexit U.K. politicians that a “generous” U.S. agreement would be agreed quickly, nothing has happened.<br />The harsh reality is the prospects of a quick and generous trade deal with the United States are zero. Firstly, there is no such thing as a fast trade deal – the average U.S. deal takes four years. Secondly, the U.S., and this president in particular, does not make generous commercial deals. Trump has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has threatened to abandon the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico and Canada, the other countries in the deal, agree to strict limits on the number of government contracts that Mexican and Canadian companies can win in the United States.<br />Oddly enough, if the U.K. got a trade deal with the U.S., London would have to give in to Washington’s demands to allow American health giants access to contracts in the U.K.’s state-funded National Health Service, as well as accept lower regulatory standards for U.S. imports. That’s generous for the U.S., but a very hard sell in the U.K.<br />May will, of course, make up with Trump. As Brexit looms, her political future is now almost entirely dependent on the “special relationship.”<br />But she would do well to remember that politics for Trump is a zero-sum negotiation. He has a pathological need to win in everything. And while he needs sycophants to constantly reassure him, he despises their weakness.<br />Hence, I suspect our best hope for the special relationship may well lie in the impending nuptials of Prince Harry and U.S. actress Meghan Markle. Wonder if Trump will get an invitation to that?<br />Trump’s crude pandering to his political base at home is far more important to him The prospects of a quick and generous trade deal <br /><i>Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared on page 7 of THE DAILY STAR on November 6, 2017.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-24919824741001051392017-05-09T07:02:00.000-07:002017-05-09T07:02:46.155-07:00Oh, Lord: The peers’ unconvincing reportBy Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star<br />Monday, May 8 2017<br /><br />The U.K. House of Lords has been dubbed the Bermuda Triangle of British politics. It’s where elderly or unwanted politicians are sent by their party leaders to disappear and be forgotten about.<br />For the Lords is the largely toothless second chamber of the U.K. Parliament. Its members are unelected. Around 10 percent are so-called hereditary peers, those who sit in the chamber courtesy of the historical deeds of their ancestors. The other 90 percent are political appointees; some are rich political donors, but most are former government officials, who on elevation to the House of Lords get a grand title, a robe made from rabbit fur, and a $400 a day attendance allowance (plus expenses). Nice work if you can get it.<br />And part of that nice work caused a minor stir last week when the House of Lords International Relations Select Committee published a report calling for an overhaul of U.K. policy in the Middle East. The gist of the peers’ report was that the U.K. must end its slavish reliance on U.S. leadership in the region.<br />Now you could be forgiven for thinking there hasn’t been much in the way of U.S. leadership in the region over the last decade. But it’s correct to say the U.K. has happily fallen in line with Washington’s indolence.<br />However, lest there be any doubt, the Lords singled out the “mercurial and unpredictable” nature of current U.S. President Donald Trump, whom it warned “has the potential to destabilize further the region,” rather than the laconic foreign policy of Barack Obama.<br />On Iran, where Trump has vowed to rip up the deal Obama struck with Tehran over its nuclear program (although he has taken no action to do so), and the Israel-Palestine situation, where the president has effectively abandoned the long-standing, but largely meaningless, U.S. commitment to a twostate solution, the report said: “The U.S. president has taken positions that are unconstructive and could even escalate conflict.”<br />The committee’s chairman, Lord Howell, said: “In a world less automatically dominated by the U.S. underpinning security in the region, it is no longer right to have a stance at every stage of ‘If we just get on with the U.S. everything will be alright.’”<br />Fine words. However, in the post-Brexit world U.K. policy in just about every sphere, from foreign policy and especially international trade, is entirely focused on getting on with the U.S., even, as we have seen, a U.S. led by the “mercurial and unpredictable” Trump.<br />Indeed, Howell, a former foreign policy adviser to ex-Prime Minister David Cameron, appeared blissfully oblivious to the reality of Brexit as he insisted the U.K. distance itself from Trump’s “destabilizing postures” in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He instead called on the U.K. to play an active role in European diplomacy to solve the conflict. Come again? Whatever influence the U.K. has in European diplomacy is diminishing on a daily basis. Last week Prime Minister Theresa May accused European politicians of making “threats” against the U.K. in a bid to influence the country’s general election, which takes place in June.<br />A few days after May’s broadside, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was speaking in a conference in Florence. He began his speech in English but switched to French, because, he told the audience, “Slowly but surely, English is losing importance in Europe.” He then accused the U.K. of “abandoning the EU.”<br />Far from helping drive Europe’s international diplomacy, the U.K. is hurtling toward Washington at a rate of knots, regardless of Trump’s policies on NATO or anything else.<br />To borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, it’s the economy stupid, and as the U.K. exits the largest single market in the world it is desperate to secure a trade deal with the largest economy in the world (in nominal GDP terms).<br />Indeed, the U.K.’s efforts to ingratiate itself with Washington are becoming ever more desperate. Kicking off the election campaign last month Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the government could join any future U.S. military action against Syria without parliamentary approval. He added it would be “very difficult to say no” if Trump asked for help.<br />Moreover, it is worth pointing out that while the peers fired several broadsides at Trump’s “destabilizing” impact on the Middle East they studiously avoided discussing the disruptive role of some of the committee’s members in the region.<br />Howell himself was a cheerleader for the 2011 “intervention lite” in Libya, which failed to put boots on the ground following the overthrow of Col. Moammar Gadhafi and created the vacuum that is filled today by the bloody chaos of myriad murderous militias. Baroness Helic, another member of the committee, was also an adviser to the Cameron government during the Libyan intervention.<br />The most famous member of the committee though is Lord Reid of Cardowan, better known as John Reid, the combative former U.K. defense secretary under Tony Blair. At the time of the invasion of Afghanistan Reid famously opined British troops might be able to carry out their mission without actually having to fight the Taliban. Later he was a vocal cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, the event that is arguably at the root of most of what ills the Middle East today.<br />For Trump’s critics, his two big interventions in the region – the decision last month to drop the “Mother of All Bombs” on suspected Daesh (ISIS) fighters in eastern Afghanistan – rather than targeting the Taliban – and his missile strike against Syria, reinforces the “mercurial and unpredictable” nature of the president.<br />It would be wonderful if Trump’s airstrike on President Bashar Assad represented the start of a proper U.S. engagement with the region, but it doesn’t. It’s simply a cheap expression of moral outrage. Assad remains free to use more conventional weapons to murder many more defenseless Syrian men, women and children.<br />But one can argue that Trump did at least show both the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian backers that there is a limit to how much barbarism the West will tolerate. Maybe it’s not worth much applause, but it hardly warrants condemnation. After a decade of Western inertia, it has not made the situation in Syria any worse.<br />Where the peers did hit the right notes were in their criticism of the U.K.’s policy on Syria, which the report said was characterized by “confusion and disarray.” Sadly it offered no solutions, beyond a bland statement that “lessons of intervention, or nonintervention, in Iraq, Libya and Syria must be thoroughly learnt.”<br />The peers’ call for the U.K. to give “serious consideration” to recognizing Palestine as a state in order to boost the Middle East peace process is laudable, but again highly unlikely in the post-Brexit political landscape.<br />The peers also called for the government to take a tougher line with Saudi Arabia over its actions in Yemen, including the possibility of suspending some arms exports to the kingdom. That will certainly go down well with Trump. Washington is in talks with Saudi Arabia about tens of billions of dollars worth of new arms deals as Trump seeks to honor his election pledge to boost U.S. manufacturing.<br />On the whole, this report is proof of the great 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot’s maxim: “The cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.”<br /><i>Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, is a writer in the United Kingdom. A version of this article appeared in The Daily Star on Monday May 8 2017. </i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-49817139421009262852017-03-28T11:44:00.000-07:002017-03-28T11:44:30.509-07:00A cue from Churchill on how to fight terrorBy Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star<br />Tuesday, March 28 2017.<br /><br /><br />It has emerged that one of the four people murdered during the Westminster terror attack in London last week, 75year-old Leslie Rhodes, used to be Winston Churchill’s window cleaner. It’s a quirky footnote to the tragedy, one that for some, links the attack, and those which Islamist terrorists have unleashed in other cities, to the struggle for civilization against barbarism in the middle of the last century. We have heard this before of course. The clash of civilizations has been the battle cry of many Western leaders since 9/11.<br />Oddly enough, Churchill had a decidedly contrarian view of terrorism. Speaking in Parliament in January 1947, less than two years after the end of World War II, Churchill said: “No country in the world is less fit for a conflict with terrorists than Great Britain. That is not because of her weakness or cowardice: It is because of her restraint and virtues, and the way of life which we have lived so long in this sheltered island.”<br />Ironically he was talking about Zionist terrorists in Palestine. But his words remain relevant. Because within hours of the attack, the U.K. government was quick to resurrect its perennial desire to implement a litany of heavy-handed, coercive measures to combat the threat posed by Islamist terror groups.<br />Rhodes, along with two other people, was killed, and 50 others injured, when British-born Muslim convert Khalid Masood mowed down pedestrians with his car on Westminster Bridge before crashing into the gates of the Houses of Parliament, gaining entry to the grounds and stabbing to death an unarmed police officer. Masood, or Adrian Elms if you prefer his birth name, was quickly shot by an armed policeman – the bodyguard of the U.K.’s defense secretary who happened to be near the gate where Masood entered. The entire attack lasted just 82 seconds. It was claimed by Daesh (ISIS), who called Masood its “soldier.”<br />It is understandable that the death of a brave policeman has led to calls for all police officers who guard Parliament to be armed. But the government was also quick to call for increased powers to allow security services greater access to the online communications and internet browsing history of individuals. On Sunday, Amber Rudd, the U.K. home secretary and the minister responsible for law and order, threatened to introduce legislation to force tech companies to allow intelligence agencies access to encrypted messaging services after it emerged Masood had sent a WhatsApp message minutes before his deadly attack.<br />Rudd also warned internet companies such as Google, which runs YouTube, and other smaller sites such as WordPress and Telgram, that they must do more to stop extremist material appearing online.<br />You can see Rudd’s point. In the last week Daesh has flooded YouTube with violent recruitment videos in what is seen as an attempt to capitalize on the attack and encourage others to repeat it. <br />But I am reminded of Churchill’s words. <br />It’s worth pointing out that last year Rudd was forced to abandon a shameful draconian plan to force companies to publish lists of all their foreign workers in a bid to “name and shame” British companies that employed too many non-U.K. nationals.<br />What terrorists want is to terrorize us. What better proof that they are successful than to see democracies abandon rights that liberal societies cherish?<br />Would more armed police, or greater access to Masood’s social media, have prevented the London attack? The former may have saved the life of the unarmed policeman, but it would not have prevented the deaths of those mowed down by Masood when he turned his car into a lethal weapon.<br />Terrorism does not rely on a great amount of sophistication, or collaboration that security services can monitor. A kitchen knife and a car is all you need because, as we have seen, the biggest threat to London and other cities is lone wolf attacks. Daesh may have been quick to claim Masood’s bloody deed, but security officials do not believe he was part of an Islamist cell of the kind that carried out the Paris and Brussels atrocities.<br />Of the 12 people arrested in the aftermath of the attack, only two remain in custody, while a third has been released on bail. A security official said: “There is nothing dramatic about this being a global plan or directed from overseas. There is nothing to suggest he was operating as part of a cell.”<br />The reality for western democracies is that it was always a question of time before a lone fanatic mounted an attack on London along the lines of those that have taken place with much deadlier results in Paris, Nice, Brussels, Berlin and Istanbul.<br />At the risk of sounding callous, Masood’s attack on Parliament succeeded only in generating publicity. It had no strategic significance, it didn’t bring the U.K. capital to its knees, and the death toll pales in comparison to the numbers killed in those other cities, not to mention the daily civilian carnage in Syria and Iraq.<br />If Masood was seriously trying to attack Parliament, the citadel of our democracy, and kill British lawmakers, he failed.<br />Of course, terrorism is more about creating a climate of fear, or terror, and a sense of constant insecurity. But in reality Masood failed here too. Westminster Bridge is open again. Londoners went to work the next day, on buses, trains and by foot, and went out to play again that night.<br />Rather than attempting to further erode civil liberties by increasing the state’s power to snoop on our private lives, there’s a plausible case for asking tougher questions about why intelligence agencies failed to pick up on Masood, who came to the attention of MI5 six years ago because of his contacts with known extremists.<br />It is worth remembering the Daesh executioner “Jihadi John,” Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, was able to escape to Syria in 2012 despite being on an MI5 terror watch list, which prohibited him from leaving the U.K. Despite extensive so-called intrusive surveillance of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and hacked to death an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013.<br />The leaders of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net.<br />It is worth pointing out that since the 2005 tragedy the U.K. has not suffered another attack on the scale, largely because security services have successfully employed powers already at their disposal to monitor and prevent other outrages – they have foiled at least 10 attacks in the past two years.<br />Of course we must protect ourselves from terrorists. But we must also ensure that by protecting our way of life we do not trample over the civil liberties that underpin the way of life we are trying to protect. The hard-earned rights and liberties of people pursuing their daily affairs must be safeguarded too.<br />Churchill never shied away from a fight. But he never forgot what he was fighting for.<br />Legend has it that during the darkest days of the war Churchill was asked to cut arts funding and to send the great works of art on display in London abroad for safe keeping. He refused with the simple response: “Then what are we fighting for?”<br /><i>Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, is a writer in the United Kingdom. A version of this article appeared in The Daily Star on Tuesday, March 28 2017.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-66635039093648986362017-02-12T06:55:00.001-08:002017-02-12T06:55:40.262-08:00To win post-Brexit allies, May goes too farBy Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star <br />Thursday, February 9 2017<br /><br />As official visits go, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to London earlier this week looked like a textbook lesson in how not to conduct diplomacy. But looks can be deceptive.<br />In the full glare of the world’s media, Netanyahu arrived at U.K. Prime Minister’s Theresa May’s residence at 10 Downing Street only to find himself locked out and left standing in the street on his own for what seemed an eternity. At one point I wondered if he might have to kneel down at the front of the door and announce his arrival by shouting through the letterbox. Fortunately, before it got to that stage, the door was finally opened and a very sheepish Netanyahu gratefully entered.<br />On the face of it, things didn’t appear to get much better for Israel’s prime minister once he got inside.<br />May smiled and stressed the importance her government attaches to a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In response, Netanyahu, a man who appears to have a permanent frown these days, warned about the danger Iran poses to the Middle East.<br />A few hours after the meeting relations appeared to get even frostier when Israeli MPs voted in favor of the so-called “regulation law,” which gives retroactive approval to illegally built Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.<br />May’s government was quick to condemn the new law. Tobias Ellwood, the foreign office minister responsible for the Middle East, said: “It is of great concern that the bill paves the way for significant growth in settlements in the West Bank, threatening the viability of the two-state solution.” He added: “As a long-standing friend of Israel, I condemn the passing of the Land Regularization Bill by the Knesset which damages Israel’s standing with its international partners.” Well up to a point. The most important international partner, U.S. President Donald Trump, who will host Netanyahu in Washington next week, has yet to offer the world his thoughts on the matter. His administration is on record as saying Israeli settlements are not an obstacle to peace, but their expansion “may not be helpful.” Go figure. At any rate, Netanyahu was still en route from the U.K. when the vote happened, having left London empty handed. His clarion call for May to follow Trump in imposing fresh sanctions on some Iranian individuals and entities following Tehran’s ballistic missile test last week were ignored.<br />May has asked the U.N. to examine whether the tests breached any resolutions, but U.K. government officials insist it is a separate issue from the 2015 nuclear accord that lifted a host of sanctions on Iran in return for curbing its nuclear program.<br />Moreover, when she became the first Western leader to meet Trump in Washington last month, May advised the U.S. president of the dangers of jeopardizing the nuclear accord, advice that appears to have been heeded in Washington – despite Trump’s tweet last week that “Iran is playing with fire – they don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!”<br />May reiterated her stance to Netanyahu, telling him the accord was “vital,” though in what some see as a nod to Trump’s misgivings about the deal she added it needed to be “properly enforced and policed.” That caveat could prove significant. Because for all the frostiness in the stagecraft of this week’s visit, behind the scenes other factors are at play for May as she seeks to create a viable blueprint for the U.K.’s post-Brexit economic future.<br />There has been a visible change in the U.K.’s relationship with Israel since London played a key role in drafting last December’s U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the continuing expansion of settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.<br />It was followed by May’s bizarre criticism of outgoing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for his condemnation of Israeli settlement expansion – just days after the U.N. vote. The broadside at Kerry was widely seen as a clumsy attempt to earn some brownie points with the then-incoming Trump administration – Trump of course made a number of stridently pro-Israel comments during his election campaign.<br />Why? Because post-Brexit U.K. is desperate for business.<br />May is under intense pressure to secure some sort of U.K.-U.S. trade deal in the wake of her announcement last month that she is prepared to accept a clean break with the European Union, that will sacrifice membership of the single market and customs union, in order to allay domestic concerns about immigration and Europe’s open borders.<br />That has led to a rather unseemly rush to broker new trade deals, which has also seen May cosying up to Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan in recent weeks. The two governments have agreed to set up a joint working group to carry out the groundwork for a bilateral trade deal. Turkey’s current trade with the U.K. amounts to around 16 billion pounds a year.<br />May even tapped up Netanyahu, who also agreed to establish a working group to prepare the ground for a post-Brexit freetrade agreement. The U.K. is already Israel’s second-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade worth 5 billion pounds a year.<br />Ironically, the U.K.’s former EU trading partners are reassured that the rush of British firms to cultivate business deals with Iran since sanctions were lifted means May’s support for the nuclear accord will remain solid.<br />However, during this month’s EU summit in Malta European leaders openly expressed fears that May’s desperation for post-Brexit allies is pushing her too far toward Trump, and a softening of U.K. opposition to Israeli settlement expansion.<br />It is worth pointing out that the U.K. failed to attend last month’s one-day Middle East peace conference organized by the French government in Paris. U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the conference was “a little like Hamlet without the Prince” because the Israelis had declined to attend.<br />But is U.K. opposition to settlements up for negotiation?<br />The fear that it might be underlines the dilemma that Brexit poses for the U.K. and its Middle East commitments. It’s early days yet, but despite the stagecraft of this week’s visit, it’s clear May is keener than any of her predecessors to keep Netanyahu onside as a means to court favor with Trump and the potential for favorable U.S. trade deals. At the end of May’s meeting with Netanyahu she invited him to return to the U.K. later this year to attend events to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in November. I very much doubt he will be left waiting on the doorstep on that day.<br /><i>Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star. This article was first published in the print edition of The Daily Star on Thursday February 9 2017.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-90753639028598801472016-10-31T12:50:00.001-07:002016-10-31T12:50:39.332-07:00Former General's homecoming: the band plays on <b><i>As Michel Aoun becomes President of Lebanon, my Eyewitness sketch of his homecoming to Beirut in 2005, after 15 years of exile in France - first published in The Daily Star on May 9 2005.<b></b></i></b><br /><br /><br />FROM THE DAILY STAR, May 9 2005.<br />By Michael Glackin <br />Beirut -- Eyewitness <br />The assembled members of the Kfarzebian-Kesrouan brass band stood resplendent beside the podium in their uniforms. Their ages looked to range from 17 to 70, and they were occasionally guilty of the odd bum note. But what they lacked in finesse they made up for in sheer volume, particularly if, as I was, you were standing right in front of them beside the stage. <br />Like the thousands of others gathered in Beirut's Martyrs' Square, the Kfarzebian-Kesrouan band had come to welcome home Aoun, Lebanon's prince-across-the-water, and to his followers as near a messiah as you can get in politics. <br />Most of the overwhelmingly young and largely Christian crowd gathered in the square would barely have been school age when the man his opponents dub "Napol-Aoun" was airlifted to safety out of Beirut by the French government, to a long exile in Paris. <br />The Martyrs' Square statue, which by now must be the most-climbed structure outside the Himalayas, had a huge photograph of the former general in his military uniform hoisted to the top of it and, as always happens on these occasions, was bedecked in Lebanese flags. <br />The Kfarzebian-Kesrouan band, which in addition to its trumpets and drums is also the proud owner of the largest Lebanese flag I have ever seen, tried hard to compete with the appearance of a loud thudding beat booming from giant speakers on the stage. But at the first sighting of Aoun's motorcade approaching the square, the crowd went wild, which also unleashed a fresh enthusiasm in the band that heartily banged and blew new life into their instruments. <br />Suddenly the music stopped. The crowd chanted Aoun's name and Martyrs' Square caught sight of the general for the first time in 15 years as he appeared from backstage. My new-found friends in the band struck up another loud tune before finally giving in to the power of the speakers, which were by now playing the national anthem at a level that could probably be heard in Damascus. <br />Wearing a suit and tie and standing behind a bullet-proof screen the former general, who cut such a dashing figure as a uniformed commander during the 1980s, looked more like a chubby middle-class businessman. Luckily none of his allies on stage tried to hoist him on their shoulders as his army colleagues used to do in the old days. <br />Oddly enough, when Aoun finished his speech it was met with polite applause rather than the rapturous cheering that preceded it. The gathered masses got more enthusiastic after their hero left the stage, dancing to more loud music blasting out from the stage. At that point my friends in the band gave up the ghost and downed their instruments to have a cigarette. "We go home for a drink now," they told me. "He's back and we were here to greet him. That is all that matters." It was indeed.Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-30826520353340588962016-10-15T09:48:00.000-07:002016-10-15T10:03:14.149-07:00 A U.K. malodorous wind of changeBy Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star<br />Wednesday, October 12 2016<br /><br />If you thought barrel-scraping pandering to populism was limited to political discourse in America think again. <br />While the sickening spectacle of Donald Trump securing the Republican Party nomination for U.S. President has dominated the world's headlines, the type of xenophobia represented and fueled by the mega mouth businessman is on the increase everywhere. Even in the home of the so called "mother of parliaments".<br />Last summer's vote for the UK to leave the European Union - so called Brexit - appears to have fired the starting gun on a frantic political race to the bottom, with the government increasingly trying to appeal to voters basest instincts in much the same way as the Hair Fuhrer has done in the U.S. <br />Last week Home Secretary Amber Rudd, the minister responsible for law and order in the UK, gleefully announced that companies would in future have to publish lists of all their foreign workers. Her department later threatened to "name and shame" British companies that employed too many non UK nationals.<br />Thankfully, the backlash was ferocious. Steve Hilton, a one time adviser to former Prime Minister David Cameron and oddly enough a vocal supporter of Brexit, called Rudd's plan "divisive, repugnant, and insanely bureaucratic", adding: "Hey Amber, for your next brain­wave, why not announce that foreign workers will be tattooed with numbers on their forearms?"<br />Tamara Rojo, the Spanish-born director of that most English of institutions, the English National Ballet, made a similar point: She said: “After 20 years contributing to this great country and having been recognized with a CBE [Commander of the British Empire award], how long before I am made to sew a star on my clothes?” <br />To be perfectly fair, comparisons with Nazi Germany are somewhat wide of the mark - even allowing for the fact that 13th century England was the first European nation to require Jews to wear a visible cloth badge (prompted by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 which demanded Jews and Muslims wear special dress since you ask). <br />At any rate, within days of Rudd's crass announcement government ministers hit the airwaves to announce they had abandoned the policy. Well sort of. <br />Cabinet minister Michael Fallon insisted businesses would not have to publish the number of foreign workers they employ. However, he added they could still be made to "report their numbers" to government in order to help establish areas where there are shortages of British workers. <br />The problem here is that any sort of "foreigners list" has more than a faint whiff of the goosestep about it, particularly when set against the backdrop of other recent government announcements.<br />Just before Rudd revealed her plans, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt insisted the National Health Service would slash large numbers of foreign doctors working in the UK and hire British ones in their place. Hopefully the Lebanese orthodontist treating my teenage daughter will be allowed to remain in his job long enough to fit her train tracks before he's placed on the next plane out of here.<br />Just to ensure no foreign worker was left untouched by this malodorous wind of change, it also emerged last week that UK based foreign academics can no longer serve as advisers to the government on EU affairs. The move is understood to be due to concerns that sensitive information could be leaked to the governments of EU member states during Brexit negotiations. <br />Considering Prime Minister Theresa May has already shown most of her Brexit cards to the EU the ban looks pretty daft. She has already pledged to invoke article 50, the mechanism which will trigger the formal two-year process for Brexit, within the next six months. She has also made clear her willingness to sacrifice the UK's access to the EU free trade market in order to avoid having to accept the free movement of EU labour - the so called "hard Brexit".<br />There's not much left to leak after that, something the currency markets have already figured out - sterling has fallen to a 31 year low since the prime minister made those announcements.<br />On one level you can see where the government is coming from. The message from last summer's Brexit vote was clear. Those who voted to leave the EU want tighter curbs on immigration. It is right that the government should take note of this.<br />However, confronted with disaffected voters the government appears willing to say and do anything, regardless of the cost to the economy, and regardless of the fact that its policies are legitimizing a growing intolerance towards foreign workers. <br />Make no mistake, the EU referendum campaign unleashed a wave of bigotry in the UK, evidenced by the assassination of Jo Cox, a vocal pro EU member of parliament (and a champion of Syrian refugees). Her assassin shouted "Britain First" at her as he shot and stabbed her in broad daylight on the street outside her local library a week before the Brexit vote. <br />Official government figures reveal that in the three months since the UK voted to leave the EU there has been a sharp increase in reported hate crimes against ethnic minorities and foreign nationals, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.<br />You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to detect the government's sudden ill-conceived plans to crack down and "get tough" on foreign workers, whether they are waiters, carpenters, doctors, or academics, is pandering to people with extreme tendencies. Indeed there is a strong danger that it is feeding and even tacitly vindicating those who are carrying out attacks in increasing numbers on foreigners in the UK. <br />Worryingly, a day after Rudd announced her plan, an opinion poll revealed 60 percent of the public supported her. Only 25 percent opposed the plan. That support comes despite the fact that the number of UK nationals in work is at its highest level in almost 20 years. <br />The politics of snarling and sneering is no substitute for substance and leadership. A hate filled lunatic fringe may have captured the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower, but that's no reason for the government of the UK to embrace it. The barrel-scraping has to stop. In an increasingly unstable world the UK requires leadership, not mob rule dressed up as government.<br /><i>Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on October 12 2016.</i><br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-29924271893720018572016-07-10T13:54:00.000-07:002016-07-10T13:54:42.971-07:00Chilcot’s 8,000-page report exposes Iraq invasion hidden deals By Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star<br />Saturday, July 9, 2015.<br /><br /><br />The 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift, author “Gulliver’s Travels,” famously said: “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.” I was reminded of Swift’s words as I watched Tony Blair’s emotionally charged response to the publication of the long awaited Chilcot Report into the U.K.’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq Wednesday.<br />Sir John Chilcot delivered a damning verdict on Blair’s leadership, the most damning criticism of a prime minister in living memory. It took Chilcot seven years, and 2.6 million words, but his report makes plain that Blair took the decision to go to war at a time when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat and “before peaceful options for disarmament were exhausted.”<br />Chilcot found that Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction after accepting flawed intelligence, which he resolutely failed to question or properly scrutinize.<br />Chilcot also revealed evidence that Blair pledged to support U.S. President George W. Bush’s ambition to topple Saddam within weeks of the 9/11 attacks on America, culminating eight months before the 2003 invasion in an unqualified commitment to support the U.S. invasion – “I will be with you, whatever.” Yet at the same time Blair was still pretending to Parliament, and the U.K. public, that he was desperately seeking a peaceful solution.<br />Chilcot also found Blair sent British troops into combat ill-equipped, and that he had failed to plan for the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of the country.<br />And yet, when confronted with this woeful litany of deceit and failure this Wednesday, Blair, visibly shaken and looking like a broken man, was stridently unrepentant about what is widely seen as the worst foreign policy decision by a U.K. government since the disastrously botched attempt to gain control of the Suez canal in 1956.<br />“I believe we made the right decision and the world is better and safer,” he declared.<br />Blair confessed “more sorrow and regret than you can ever believe” but insisted he had acted in good faith, based on intelligence at the time which said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He conceded that this “turned out to be wrong,” but failed to refer specifically to Chilcot’s charge that he deliberately exaggerated the threat to gain support for the invasion.<br />In short, Blair said he would “do it all again.” The former prime minister, who at times looked close to tears, insisted he could “look the nation in the eye” because he did not mislead it into war. He insisted Iraqis today, dying in their thousands, are better off since the invasion, particularly the Kurds.<br />For all the drama of the last week, much of what Chilcot concluded in his 8,000 page report is already widely known, including Blair’s infamous note to Bush in July 2002, in which he said: “I will be with you, whatever.” This was quoted in journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s 2010 book “The End of the Party,” based on his interviews with David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, and Sir Christopher Meyer, then Britain’s ambassador to the U.S.<br />It’s also worth pointing out that we are unable to see the other side of the correspondence – what Bush said to Blair – which Washington has refused to declassify. That means the notes are onesided, and arguably lack context for a proper judgment.<br />One could also argue that some of Chilcot’s criticism of Blair is a little unjust. Chilcot’s accusation that Blair sidelined his Cabinet in the run-up to war, preferring instead to discuss key details with selected trusted aides is more than a little laughable.<br />At the time, Blair had overwhelming support for the invasion both in Cabinet and in Parliament – though not among the general public. Those politicians who supported him may now argue that they did so under a false prospectus, but all were happy to do so at the time without seeking to scrutinize the evidence themselves. Surely they should have spoken up if they felt they were being left out of key discussions?<br />Meanwhile, the U.K.’s top spy chief, Sir John Scarlett happily allowed Blair’s government to exaggerate the value of information the intelligence agencies believed to be flawed to make his case for war. The report also asks why the U.K. generals failed to protest that they were ill-prepared and inadequately supplied troops into battle. Chiclot specifically points out that U.K. military commanders made “over-optimistic assessments” of their capabilities, which had led to a number of “bad decisions.”<br />Blair does appear to have been able to cajole or bully the government’s legal adviser, Lord Goldsmith, into changing his initial legal advice over the legality of the invasion without United Nations support. Chilcot did not make a judgment on whether Blair or his ministers were in breach of international law, but added: “The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for U.K. military action were far from satisfactory.”<br />Fair enough. But it is worth pointing out that for all the legal arguments surrounding the invasion, the West had created a humanitarian disaster in Iraq in the decade preceding the war courtesy of the U.N. sanctions program. By 2003, there was no electricity in many parts of the country, barely any running water, and few medicines. UNICEF estimated that more than half a million Iraqi children died as a consequence of sanctions between 1990 and 2003. Yet as Chilcot makes clear, there was no coherent plan by the invaders to rebuild the destroyed country once they occupied it.<br />Chilcot makes clear that Blair, and as such the U.K., had virtually no role in either planning the invasion or the aftermath which was left entirely to the Americans. Indeed Chiclot criticized the U.S. for ignoring U.K. pleas to avoid implementing a wide-ranging de-Baathification of the army and government offices. Blair’s comment Wednesday that the U.K. was a junior partner of the U.S., was an understatement. Looking at parts of Chilcot’s report it’s clear the U.K.’s role was sadly more akin to the wider world view of Blair being Bush’s poodle.<br />Finally, Blair insisted that those military men and women who have died in the conflict did so in the “defining global security struggle of the 21st century against the terrorism and violence which the world over destroys lives, divides communities.” Perhaps. But many more would argue the conflict they gave their lives for has instead had a significant role in if not creating, then shaping and fueling that terrorism.<br />Moreover, as Chilcot’s report shows beyond doubt, the decision to invade Iraq destroyed the U.K.’s international reputation, and single-handedly killed the notion of liberal intervention to protect human lives and human rights in future. In one of Blair’s most telling comments Wednesday, he appeared to express bemusement at that fact. “It [Iraq] also overshadows everything people think about me” he said, seeming to put his bruised ego and tarnished political legacy on a par with the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the bloody quagmire of Iraq since 2003 and their grieving families. <br />Blair it seems, is pretty unbroken.<br />The same cannot be said for the dead, the wounded and those left behind to grieve them. To borrow another phrase from Swift, Blair seems to have discovered that “Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.”<br /><i>Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on July 7, 2015.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-25852973037928905862016-06-27T04:45:00.001-07:002016-06-27T04:45:52.011-07:00Brexit: A nation turns on itselfBy Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star<br />Monday, June 27 2016<br /><br /><br />Beirut -- To say the political establishment in the U.K. has been rocked to its foundations by last week’s historic vote to leave the European Union is, for once, an understatement. The shocked reactions of leaders around the world reveal that most have not yet fully absorbed what has happened. They are not alone. Neither have the U.K.’s political leaders.<br /><br />The U.K. voted to withdraw from the EU by a narrow margin. Leave won the referendum with 51.9 percent of the vote, while Remain finished on 48.1 percent. The turnout was 72 percent. It’s interesting to note that roughly 75 percent of the U.K.’s over-65s voted Leave, while a similar number of under-25s voted Remain. A clear case of the old deciding the future of the young. Whether older heads are wiser remains to be seen, but I have my doubts.<br /><br />As a long-standing Euroskeptic I have many misgivings about the EU: There is its lack of political accountability, its wasteful bureaucracy and idiotic regulations, its diktats and increasing centralizing tendencies. The EU is an open goal when it comes to its shortcomings. But the EU debate, while masquerading as an argument about economics and sovereignty, was really about immigration. There was a pikestaff link between hostility to immigration and support for the Leave campaign, the so-called Brexit vote.<br /><br />Over the last 20 years, the foreign-born population of the U.K. has increased from around 3.8 million to 8.3 million. Brexit campaigners were quick to blame immigrants for increased pressure on schools, hospitals and housing and promised tighter immigration controls and that money the U.K. currently sends to Brussels would instead be used to relieve this pressure.<br /><br />But since winning the vote Leave campaigners have spent the weekend insisting they never promised there would be a decline in immigration, and have now said it was a mistake to tell voters there would be more money for the U.K.’s state-run health system.<br /><br />Meanwhile the mayor of Calais demanded France scrap the 2003 Touquet agreement, which keeps thousands of asylum-seekers on the French side of the Channel Tunnel, living in the notorious “Jungle,” the name given to the makeshift camps that have developed around the tunnel.<br /><br />Calais is just part of a far wider refugee crisis across Europe, which has been grappling with its biggest influx of asylum-seekers since World War II, as people flee conflict-ridden zones in the Middle East, and Africa. It is this crisis, even more than the 2008 financial crisis, which has done the most to destabilize the European project, and secured the Leave vote.<br /><br />The dodgy deal the EU brokered with Turkey to lock Middle East refugees outside Europe’s borders, a bribe predicated on allowing Turks visa-free travel across the EU, was used as a stick to beat the Remain camp as Leave campaigners noisily shouted about millions of Turks flooding into the U.K.<br /><br />The European issue has now accounted for the scalps of three British prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and now David Cameron, who announced his resignation Friday. All three were leaders of the right-wing Conservative Party, which in the last 30 years has been bitterly divided over Britain’s role in Europe.<br /><br />However, in the aftershocks of last week’s historic vote, the ghosts of the left-wing Labour party’s own Euroskepticism, which had been dormant for almost four decades, have come back to haunt them.<br /><br />Yesterday Hilary Benn, a leading pro-EU Labour politician and the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, was unceremoniously sacked by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for criticizing the leader’s lackluster support for the Remain campaign. Ironically, Corbyn’s political hero was Benn’s father, the left-wing and anti-EU politician Tony Benn. Following Benn’s sacking, half of Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet quit and demanded he stand down as Labour leader.<br /><br />In the vacuum of leadership since the vote, the unity of the entire U.K. looks under threat. Nicola Sturgeon, who heads the ruling party in Scotland, where people voted to remain in the EU by a wide margin, has called for a second referendum on Scottish independence, enabling Scots to break away from the U.K. and remain in the EU. The Brexit vote has even led to calls for a referendum that would effectively unite Ireland and Northern Ireland to enable the latter to remain in the EU.<br /><br />Modern British politics hasn’t been enveloped by such chaos since the Suez crisis.<br /><br />More importantly for the Middle East is the impact the U.K.’s withdrawal could have on the EU’s role in the Middle East.<br /><br />The domino effect of Brexit could see other Euroskeptic member states, most notably Denmark, but also more recent complainers, such as the Netherlands, forced into calling their own referendums on EU membership. Geert Wilders, head of the Netherlands’ anti-immigrant Party for Freedom gleefully said: “The Europhile elite has been defeated.” French far-right leader Marine Le Pen called the vote a “victory for freedom.”<br /><br />A weaker EU means its long-aspired role as a counterpoise to U.S. power in the Middle East will be firmly placed on the back burner. The EU played a leading role in brokering the deal that saw Iran curb its nuclear program. Within the so-called Union for the Mediterranean it has also created myriad trade deals with Middle East states, and funds projects linked to the beleaguered Israeli-Palestinian peace process. A disunited EU, distracted by both negotiating the U.K.’s withdrawal and holding the ring with other potentially recalcitrant members, will clearly lack the clout and inclination to carry out its admittedly second tier role in the region.<br /><br />Considering the U.K.’s role as bridgehead into Europe for America, it appears likely that Russia, and indeed Iran, could also increase their influence in the region, particularly in the current situation in Syria.<br /><br />In terms of the U.K.’s own role in the region, U.K. Foreign Office Minister Tobias Ellwood bullishly insisted it would be business as usual. He said the U.K.’s role in the fight against Daesh (ISIS) and wider Islamic extremism would continue. But in reality, the U.K.’s punching power in global politics has been diminished by last week’s vote.<br /><br />As for Cameron, by calling for this referendum he blithely sailed his country into choppy waters, crashed it on the rocks and then promptly jumped ship. The referendum, which voters here never demanded, on the U.K.’s membership of the EU, was designed as a tool for Cameron to lever his Euroskeptic party into obedience. The tool broke in his hand when the referendum became a vote about immigration and disenchantment with the nation’s body politic. Somehow, the U.K. feels like a smaller nation this morning.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of THE DAILY STAR on page 7 on Monday June 27 2016.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-58238809517317301822016-05-23T09:53:00.000-07:002016-05-23T09:53:38.787-07:00Why Chilcot’s report awaits the ‘Brexit’ voteBy Michael Glackin<br />The Daily Star <br />Tuesday, May 17 2016<br /><br /><br />George Bernard Shaw wittily remarked that “the English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.” If he were alive today, Shaw might have used the U.K. government’s long-running inquiry into why the United Kingdom went to war in Iraq in 2003 to make the same point.<br /><br />Almost seven years after the start of the inquiry, led by career civil servant Sir John Chilcot, and more than five years after it finished taking evidence, it was revealed last week that its findings will finally be published on July 6.<br />The date is significant, but we will come to that in a moment.<br /><br />Chilcot has said the principal reason for the delay was the U.K. government’s refusal to declassify secret documents which included the all-important 25 letters the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair sent to U.S. President George W. Bush, along with the transcripts of 130 telephone calls between the two men, in the run-up to the invasion.<br /><br />Further delays were caused by allowing those criticized in the report the right to respond before publication. This has led to claims that some, including Blair, former U.K. foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, and senior defense chiefs were able to dilute criticism of their roles by challenging details and demanding changes.<br /><br />But at long last Chilcot’s report, which cost $16 million and runs to more than 2.5 million words – or if you prefer four times the length of Tolstoy’s War and Peace – is now complete and was handed to ministers earlier this month. Many had expected it to be published immediately. Indeed Cameron had previously insisted he wanted to publish the report within two weeks of receiving it.<br />The reason it won’t see the light of day until July is because the government doesn’t want it published until after the U.K. has voted in the upcoming referendum on whether it should remain in the European Union, which takes place on June 23.<br /><br />Cameron has been accused of delaying the report’s publication to avoid embarrassing key “In” campaigners in the European Union debate – not least of whom is Blair. Just as the political establishment supported the Iraq War in 2003, it is also supporting the U.K. to remain in the EU. One politician told me Chilcot’s inevitable criticism of senior political figures has the potential to “significantly undermine” public trust of the political establishment and therefore “it’s unsafe to publish Chilcot until after the vote.”<br /><br />The stakes are high for Cameron. With just five weeks to go before voting opinion polls show the public is evenly split between those who wish to leave the EU and those who wish to remain in the world’s biggest trade bloc.<br />Defending the U.K.’s membership of the EU Cameron has gone as far to suggest that “Brexit” – the term coined to describe a U.K. exit from the EU – could result in Europe descending into World War III.<br /><br />In response, the leader of the Brexit campaign, former Mayor of London Boris Johnson – who many believe will succeed Cameron as Prime Minister – compared the EU to Hitler, insisting both sought to unify Europe under a single “authority.”<br /><br />Suddenly Lebanese politics looks quite sane. <br /><br />While opponents of the EU argue about its impact on national sovereignty and the unaccountability of its powerful unelected officials, immigration is the issue that will decide the outcome of next month’s vote.<br /><br />Brexit campaigners consistently cite the U.K.’s inability to “control its own borders” as the primary reason for leaving the EU. The EU principle of free movement across its borders has seen a sharp increase in people from the bloc’s poorer member states coming to the U.K. to find jobs – often accepting lower wages than U.K. nationals – and in the view of many voters has put pressure on public services and the U.K.’s welfare state.<br /><br />For this reason, the potential for a flare up of the Middle East refugee crisis as the referendum approaches threatens to deliver the result Cameron fears most.<br /><br />It is bizarre that the issue of refugees, largely from Syria and fleeing a conflagration caused in no small part by decisions taken in the West, should be the dominant issue. For a start, few of those escaping the violence have got as far as the U.K. Indeed the government has steadfastly refused to accept even a token number for settlement in stark contrast to Germany and Sweden.<br /><br />But Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the end of World War II, which saw an influx of more than 1 million refugees from the Middle East last year, has led to a sharp increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the EU and the rise of far right populist parties. This has also happened in the U.K. despite the fact that few of the refugees that crossed the Aegean have reached its shores.<br /><br />The EU’s hapless response to the issue has also increased fears among Britons that thousands of well-trained Daesh (ISIS) terrorists have used the refugee crisis as cover to slip undetected into Europe and then across its open borders, complete with freshly issued European passports.<br /><br />Regardless of the reality, perception is paramount and this narrative fits into a growing fear that Islamist terrorists will eventually be able to enter the U.K. (joining incidentally a number of existing home-grown wanna-be extremists) and carry out similar atrocities to those that have taken place in Brussels and Paris.<br /><br />Brexit campaigners are capitalizing on these fears and hoping to turn them into votes. This explains why Cameron is one of the loudest cheerleaders for the distinctly dodgy deal the EU brokered with Turkey – effectively a bribe to Ankara to lock Middle East refugees outside Europe’s borders.<br /><br />Since the deal was agreed the number of refugees crossing the Aegean to Greece has fallen sharply despite the fact that few have so far been returned to Turkey.<br /><br />However, the deal has been on borrowed time since the recent sacking of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, its principal architect, by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man who does not appear overly concerned about stemming the flow of refugees from a conflict he has played no small part in escalating.<br /><br />The deal’s unravelling looks set to lead to a fresh surge of asylum-seekers arriving on Europe’s shores in the final weeks before the U.K. referendum takes place.<br /><br />There is perhaps some poetic justice in this. Erdogan increasingly resembles the kind of autocrat the West was not so long ago keen to remove in the Arab world.<br /><br />Turkish prosecutors have opened more than 1,800 cases against people for insulting Erdogan since he became president two years ago. These include journalists, cartoonists, playwrights, actors and teenagers. Earlier this year his government seized control of the popular daily newspaper Zaman and removed its editor-in-chief.<br /><br />Germany’s desperation to appease Turkey has even resulted in a largely unfunny German comedian facing prosecution in his own country after mocking Erdogan on television.<br /><br />If getting into bed with this kind of regime is the future of the EU maybe we are better off out of it.<br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. This article first appeared in the print edition of The DAILY STAR on Tuesday, May 17 2016, on page 7.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-37780179856838355782016-04-07T05:38:00.001-07:002016-04-07T05:38:51.894-07:00U.K. and Islam's paranoia in dealing with extremists<br />By Michael Glackin <br />The Daily Star<br />Thursday, April 7 2016.<br /><br />More than a decade ago, just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, novelist Salman Rushdie warned that Islam was being hijacked by political fanatics.<br /><br />The religion whose scholars had preserved and built on the intellectual heritage of ancient Greece while Europe slept through the dark ages, was in danger from what Rushdie called: “This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, ‘infidels,’ for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.”<br /><br />Derided as alarmist by many of the liberal intelligentsia at the time, Rushdie’s warning has been vindicated, not just by the rise of Daesh (ISIS) and other extremists in the Middle East, but by a succession of terror attacks in the years since he made his comments, from Bali to London, and more recently in Garissa, Ankara, Beirut, Paris and Brussels.<br /><br />The alarming frequency of the attacks reveals that the growth of “this paranoid Islam” shows no signs of abating and is garnering an increasing number of recruits across the globe.<br /><br />Having written a great deal about the U.K. government's paranoia in dealing with the threat posed by Islamic extremists, from the use of secret trials to increasing inroads to civil liberties, it is perhaps time to confront the paranoid Islam that Rushdie identified 15 years ago.<br /><br />Last week, in the United Kingdom, Junead Khan, a Daesh sympathizer from Luton who planned to attack U.S. military personnel stationed in England, was convicted of terrorism offenses. His uncle, Shazib Khan, also from Luton, was convicted of the lesser offense of planning to travel to Syria to join Daesh.<br /><br />Khan’s trial was held under certain security and reporting restrictions and some information was withheld from the jury. Some of the evidence used to convict the pair still cannot be revealed for legal reasons.<br /><br />However, it can now be disclosed that the case provided ample evidence on how Daesh is orchestrating attacks in Europe and just how rapidly Rushdie’s “fastest growing version of Islam in the world” is growing in the U.K.<br /><br />It emerged during the trial that Junaid Hussain, Daesh's Syria-based Birmingham-born hacking expert, who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Hussain al-Britani, was in contact with a number of U.K.-based extremists, including Khan. Hussain had promised to give Khan the U.K. addresses of British soldiers that he had obtained through hacking and encouraged Khan to attack them.<br /><br />Hussain’s activities placed him high on a list of British targets for assassination and he was duly killed in a U.S. drone strike last August, just weeks after security services had arrested Khan.<br /><br />Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament at the time that Hussain was involved in “actively recruiting IS [Daesh] sympathizers and seeking to orchestrate specific and barbaric attacks against the West.”<br /><br />However, the details of such plots could not be reported until Khan’s conviction last week. Hussain was one of a number of key Daesh members whose personal details were listed in documents released in the media last month after apparently being stolen by a disillusioned Daesh fighter. The jury was not told this, nor of his senior role in the group, only that he was in Syria and had been killed in a drone strike.<br /><br />The reporting restrictions surrounding the six-and-a-half week court case were not as severe as those imposed on the trial of Erol Incedal, a British national of Turkish-Alawite descent, who was cleared in two trials in 2014 and 2015 of planning a terrorist attack in London, but convicted of being in possession of a bomb-making manual. In a first for the British judicial system, the trials were largely held in secret for reasons of “national security.” Despite several High Court challenges by media groups, citing the principle of open justice, the reasons for the secrecy have still not been publicly revealed.<br /><br />By the look of things, we will have to get used to this sort of trial, because the number of young Muslims willing to embrace “paranoid Islam” is still growing. It is worth pointing out that at least 1,000 U.K. nationals have been attracted enough by it to travel to Syria and Iraq and join Daesh – though paradoxically, in between making plans to join the group, Shazib Khan also scoured the Internet for prostitutes and adult movies.<br /><br />Khan’s desire to procure prostitutes is illustrative of the contradiction at the heart of the question of what makes young, often educated, westernized men, and women, accept a violent narrowly defined interpretation of Islam, one that is incapable of accepting the liberal ideal of free speech. Worryingly, a report from MI5 in 2011 revealed that two-thirds of British Islamist terror suspects were from affluent middle-class backgrounds.<br /><br />The answer must surely lie within. It emerged this week that the Sunni sect Deobandi, which controls almost half of the U.K.’s mosques, allowed the Al-Qaeda-linked extremist Sheikh Masood Azhar to speak at a number of its mosques in what amounted to a jihadist recruitment drive in the mid 1990s.<br /><br />A report in The Times (of London) said among those radicalized and recruited during his visit were Rashid Rauf, one of the coordinators of the July 2005 London suicide bombings and Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was later convicted of beheading the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.<br /><br />Azhar, a former associate of Osama bin Laden, was the nominal head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Pakistani terror group prohibited in India and the West, which has been linked to attacks in Kashmir, Afghanistan and India.<br /><br />Last month, Scotland’s largest mosque was rocked by allegations that its head of religious events, Sabir Ali, had held senior positions in Sipah-e-Sahaba, a terrorist group banned in the U.K. and Pakistan. The mosque has condemned Sipah-e-Sahaba as “sectarian killers” but Ali has not been suspended from his post.<br /><br />The mosque allegations came hard on the heels of the killing of Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, who was allegedly murdered by a fellow Muslim after he posted a message wishing a happy Easter to his “beloved Christian nation.” Police have confirmed the attack was “religiously prejudiced.”<br /><br />Yet, a number of Muslim groups condemned recent U.K. government proposals to combat extremism as “McCarthyist.” Under the wide-ranging proposals, groups deemed extremist by promoting hatred will be banned and places where known extremists meet, including mosques, could be closed. Parents worried that their 16- and 17-year-old children might travel to join Daesh could apply to have their passports removed, while anyone with a conviction for terrorist offenses or extremist activity would be banned from working with children.<br /><br />Civil liberties underpin the freedoms that make the U.K. an agreeable place to live. There is an argument that the government’s proposals risk undermining the very values it seeks to protect. It is an argument I have often made. In that case, the remedy to Islamic extremism can only come from within Islam. Hamza Yusuf, the charismatic American Islamic scholar, has consistently attacked Daesh’s claim to be the “authentic representative” of the Sunni Islam. More, particularly in the U.K., need to follow his lead.<br /><i>Michael Glackin. a former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, is a writer in the United Kingdom. A version of this article appeared on page 7 of The Daily Star on April 7 2016.</i><br /><br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-73619471098150785952016-02-03T07:40:00.000-08:002016-02-03T07:40:35.599-08:00The West’s tango with Putin is misguided<br />The Daily Star<br />Friday, January 29 يناير 2016<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />Fact really is stranger than fiction. What novelist could have penned the tale of the 10-year-old Muslim boy in the north of England who was quizzed by police after mistakenly writing in a school essay that he lived in a “terrorist house” rather than a “terraced house”? Following a tipoff from teachers, police were dispatched to the boy’s home to interview him and his family the following day. Not even the Jesuits were that strict about spelling. Police even took away the family laptop computer for examination.<br /><br />Following criticism of heavy-handedness, the police insisted other “worrying issues,” beyond the boy’s inability to spell “terraced,” had been raised by teachers. Apparently he had also written that his uncle beat him – which the boy’s parents insisted was untrue.<br /><br />Following their investigation police admitted “no concerns were identified, and no further action was required by any agency.” As Mark Twain remarked: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”<br /><br />There was even less sense on display during Prime Minister David Cameron’s laughable performance in front of a parliamentary committee earlier this month. Cameron was asked to explain precisely who were the 70,000 moderate Syrian fighters whom he mentioned when seeking Parliament’s approval to launch British air strikes in Syria last year. He refused to answer. The prime minister explained to the committee that if he told them who the moderates were, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Daesh (ISIS) would also “know who they were and could target them.”<br /><br />You could be forgiven for thinking that Assad and Daesh already had a good idea of who they are fighting, bombing and torturing to death on a daily basis, without relying on Cameron to tell them.<br /><br />And yet another stranger-than-fiction event occurred last week with the publication of a high-level inquiry into the 2006 killing of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in London with polonium from a Russian state nuclear facility. The inquiry found that Litvinenko was “probably” murdered on the personal order of Russian President Vladimir Putin.<br /><br />The 328-page report is extraordinary. It links Russia’s head of state not only to the Litvinenko murder but to a catalogue of assassinations inside and outside Russia. On the eve of the latest round of the so-called Vienna peace process to end the Syrian war, the inquiry’s damning indictment of Putin – accusing the West’s “partner in peace” of a raft of state-sponsored murders – was the last thing Cameron needed.<br /><br />In fact, the British government spent years blocking any inquiry into Litvinenko’s murder, until Putin, carried away with his own hubris, annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014. Despite allowing the inquiry to go ahead, Cameron is keen to minimize any damage its findings will cause Moscow at a time when diplomatic efforts to resolve the 5-year-old Syria conflict have reached a pivotal moment. Europe’s governments are under intense pressure from the worst refugee crisis the continent has faced since the end of World War II.<br /><br />Consequently, while Cameron acknowledged the inquiry’s findings and Putin’s guilt, he added: “Do we, at some level, have to go on having some sort of relationship with them because we need a solution to the Syria crisis? Yes we do. But we do it with clear eyes and a very cold heart.” In fairness, Cameron has little choice.<br /><br />It is interesting that after the Paris attacks last November world leaders were tripping over themselves to present a united front against terrorism. Yet when an act of state-sponsored nuclear terrorism took place in London, which in addition to killing Litvinenko required 700 people to be tested for radioactive poisoning, there was silence from the United Kingdom’s allies.<br /><br />Indeed, on the day the inquiry published its findings, French President Francois Hollande called for closer cooperation with Russia in the fight against Daesh. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble said Monday that the European Union must forge closer ties with Russia to resolve the Syrian crisis. The desire to court Russia over Syria is also leading to calls in Washington and Europe to abandon the sanctions imposed on Putin’s regime in the aftermath of his military adventure in Ukraine.<br /><br />The West’s desperate need for Putin’s cooperation in Syria is misguided. Like Assad, Putin is a thug. In recent months Putin’s military intervention has not only successfully strengthened Assad, it has severely weakened the moderate opposition to the regime by focusing as much, if not more, Russian firepower on them as on Daesh. The West has watched while Russia drops cluster bombs on civilian areas, an act Amnesty International has called a war crime.<br /><br />Putin may well bring pressure on Assad to compromise, or even leave power, but only if it suits his overall strategy of increasing Russian influence. It’s likely that a large slice of the bill for his cooperation will be paid in Ukraine, which the West is poised to abandon to facilitate a deal, any deal, that ends the Syrian conflict and Europe’s panic caused by the refugee crisis.<br /><br />One hopes the West does not come to rue the day it allowed Putin and Assad’s brutality to take precedent over the principles of international law and justice. Yet the message that looks most likely to come out of the Vienna process is simply that crime does pay. The facts speak for themselves. <br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article was published in the newspaper edition on page 7, January 29 2016.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-8762520646800972172015-12-11T09:31:00.001-08:002015-12-11T09:31:52.577-08:00Cameron adopts gesture politics in SyriaThe Daily Star<br />Friday, December 11 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br /><br />Within hours of the British parliament voting to expand its bombing mission against ISIS to include Syria, British security forces flew into action. Protection for the queen and other members of the royal family was immediately stepped up. Travel in royal cars, such as the vintage $500,000 Rolls Royce favored by Prince Charles, will be strictly curtailed and royals will have to use more anonymous vehicles, such as armored Range Rovers instead. <br /><br /><br />So much for Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion that expanding the United Kingdom’s largely token airstrikes will make the country “safer” from terrorist attacks. <br /><br />If only that was the sole false assertion Cameron made in his successful appeal to parliament last week. Speaking to me a few days after the vote, Walid Saffour, the president of the U.K.-based Syrian Human Rights Committee, said the decision would “attract further elements to join ISIS and expose London’s streets to further threats.” <br /><br />The two other things that happened hours after parliament gave the green light was that British Tornado jets took off from a Royal Air Force base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, and dropped seven Paveway IV laser-guided bombs on the ISIS-controlled oil fields in eastern Syria that Cameron said had funded attacks on the West. At the same time, six Typhoon jets and two Tornados deployed from the U.K. to Akrotiri, joining the eight Tornados already there that have been attacking ISIS targets in Iraq for the last year and a half. <br /><br />Broadly speaking, Cameron’s rationale behind extending the U.K.’s token airstrikes is thus: First, the laudable point that it’s wrong to turn a deaf ear to the U.K.’s closest allies, the United States and France, which have requested British help. Second, the RAF was already bombing ISIS in Iraq and stopping at a border the enemy on the ground doesn’t recognize was clearly ludicrous. Lastly, ISIS is a barbaric death cult that threatens innocent people in all corners of the world. <br /><br />No one would argue with that. However, the reality is that the addition of a handful of aircraft to the U.K.’s current paltry contribution will make no practical difference. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has said only 5 percent of the anti-ISIS missions flown in Iraq are carried out by British aircraft. The British bombing of Syria is a meaningless gesture, a fig leaf to cover for a lack of leadership in the West to tackle either ISIS or the murderous rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad. <br /><br />Cameron is common among modern leaders who believe politics is the art of being seen to do something, rather than facing up to tough decisions and actually doing something. Sir Gerald Kaufman, the U.K.’s longest serving parliamentarian, who voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but voted against extending airstrikes into Syria last week, summed up Cameron’s hypocrisy when he said: “I am not going to be a party to killing innocent civilians for what will simply be a gesture. I’m not interested in gesture politics.” <br /><br />To defeat ISIS will require “boots on the ground,” but the West wants no part of that battle. Cameron insists the boots are already there in the shape of 70,000 “moderate Sunni forces” – a figure that does not include Kurdish fighters. However, this, as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the conflict knows, is nonsense. <br /><br />There are an estimated 100 or more opposition groups fighting within Syria, each pursuing its own agenda. Indeed if Cameron truly believed in this “moderate” force it is surprising that he has consistently rejected their pleas to be supplied with heavy weapons. <br /><br />Cameron’s duplicity was best summed up by Julian Lewis, chairman of Parliament’s defense committee, who said that after former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossiers” about weapons of mass destruction which led the U.K. into the Iraq war, we now have Cameron’s “bogus battalions.” It emerged at the weekend that military officials had warned Cameron against citing the 70,000 figure, but, not for the first time, gesture won out over substance. <br /><br />But in the wake of the attacks in Paris and Tunisia one policy is emerging. It is increasingly clear an accommodation will be made with the Baath Party to impose order in Syria. Saffour believes London and Washington are now “waiting for the right moment to rehabilitate the regime, with or without Bashar.” <br /><br />As if Syrians had not paid a high enough for this conflict already. <br /><br />Cameron insists ISIS is a threat to Western “values and way of life” but is only prepared to do the bare minimum to combat its poisonous ideology. <br /><br />The U.K. is set to spend more than $200 billion over the next 20 years on a nuclear “deterrent” it will never use, yet cannot summon up the money or will to defeat ISIS in its heartland. <br /><br />Almost two years of bombing has achieved remarkably little. ISIS still controls vast swaths of Iraq and Syria and its affiliates appear able to launch attacks against the West at will. Air power can contain ISIS, but it cannot take or hold territory. Yes, Kurds in northern Iraq have successfully captured territory after bombing, but ground troops in other areas have been much less effective. <br /><br />Western boots on the ground, if possible under the aegis of the United Nations and alongside Arab troops, still remains the best potential solution to eradicating the murderous nihilism of ISIS. <br /><br />It is a solution fraught with difficulties. But what we have stood by and watched take place in Syria over the last four and a half years demands a meaningful response, one capable of resolving the problem. Something more than gesture politics. <br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article was published in the newspaper edition on page 7, December 11 2015.</i><br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-29411591721957246532015-11-16T02:11:00.000-08:002015-11-16T02:11:14.227-08:00Paris and the end of the beginningThe Daily Star<br />Monday, November 16 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />Shortly after a combined British and American intelligence operation killed Mohammed Emwazi – the infamous “Jihadi John” – U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron stood outside Downing Street and issued a stark warning to ISIS: “We have a long reach, we have unwavering determination, and we never forget about our citizens.”<br /><br />A few hours later in Paris, ISIS, or more accurately yet another of its numerous offshoots, issued its own more deadly warning: that it too has the capability to reach far beyond its self proclaimed caliphate and bring its terror and barbarism directly to the West’s doorstep.<br /><br />Friday night’s attack on Paris, in which 129 people were killed, comes hard on the heels of an ISIS affiliate blowing a Russian airliner out of the sky over Sinai, killing 224 people, and just two days after the group bombed Beirut, killing 43.<br /><br />These atrocities are a stark reminder that liquidating “Jihadi John,” or even destroying ISIS in Iraq and Syria, will not extinguish the group’s ability to terrorize and kill, in the West or elsewhere, anymore than driving Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan stopped its affiliates carrying out murder across the globe.<br /><br />Lest we forget, Al-Qaeda offshoots were behind the Madrid bombings in 2004 which killed 191 people, and the London bombings in 2007 in which 52 died. In 2008 the Al-Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Talibi killed 164 people in Mumbai.<br /><br />The Paris attack was meticulously organized and, though claimed by ISIS, is likely to have been planned inside France rather than in Raqqa or Mosul. ISIS has a ready pool of volunteers, born and living within France, ready to murder on its behalf. Indeed, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi killed 11 people, and another four died at the hands of Amedy Coulibaly, French President Francois Hollande warned it was just a matter of time before home-grown militants carried out another atrocity.<br /><br />The attack comes at the same time as ISIS has suffered a number of setbacks in its own backyard, most notably the recapture of Sinjar in northern Iraq by the Kurdish peshmerga. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is thought to have been seriously injured in an airstrike in Iraq last month. Then there is Emwazi’s largely symbolic killing, which intelligence sources have linked to the Paris attack.<br /><br />Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “This was planned long before Jihadi John’s death but it’s possible that they thought this was a good trigger.” <br /><br />France’s conduct toward Islamic terrorism has been far more proactive than its European allies. Hollande has been an active interventionist in Africa, battling Islamist militants across the Sahel region. Unlike the U.K., France has joined U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS within Syria, albeit on a limited scale.<br /><br />ISIS’ claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks specifically mentioned French air attacks “striking Muslims in the lands of the caliphate.” The terrorists that attacked the Bataclan concert hall shouted “This is for Syria” as they emptied their machine guns on the crowd.<br /><br />The French president’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance toward ISIS in response to the atrocity is likely to be more than just hyperbole. Unlike the Spanish government in 2004, which withdrew its troops from Iraq following the Madrid train bombings, France will almost certainly step up its attacks on Islamic extremists, both abroad and at home.<br /><br />In the U.K., Cameron will seek to use the Paris attack to win parliamentary support for what would be largely token U.K. airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. But unless he can get Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree a political process to replace President Bashar Assad, he is unlikely to succeed.<br /><br />Putin and Cameron are scheduled to discuss Syria Monday at the G-20 summit in Turkey. But last weekend’s Syrian talks in Vienna, aimed at ending a war in which a larger number than those killed last week in Paris are being murdered on a daily basis, further exposed that Russia, Iran and the West cannot agree on who exactly qualifies as a terrorist.<br /><br />However, the real impact of last Friday’s events is likely to be in Europe itself. It is now certain that at least two of the gunmen who carried out the Paris attack were among the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who entered Europe through Greece in the last four months.<br /><br />Amid a Europe-wide political crisis over migrant flows from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and increasing calls for tighter border controls, anti-immigration political parties are rapidly gaining support. Earlier this month German police detained a man who managed to drive across Europe from the Balkans with a carload of weapons destined for Paris.<br /><br />Writing in the Sunday Times of London, the respected, though avowedly right-wing, historian Niall Ferguson said Europe had “opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith” and whose views are “not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies.”<br /><br />But tougher border controls, abandoning the European Union Schengen Agreement, ignores the fact that there are an estimated 250 French militants who have returned from Syria, capable of radicalizing and recruiting hundreds more from the dismal immigrant banlieues of Paris.<br /><br />Of course, Paris doesn’t have a monopoly on home grown militants. They exist in the U.K. too. They are a reminder that the poisonous ideology of ISIS, and its potential to attract militants across the globe, is not dependent on its capacity to capture land and impose its caliphate faraway from Europe’s shores.<br /><br />The West sat on its hands for too long in Syria, haunted by its failures in Iraq and later, in Libya. This week Beirut and Paris paid the price for the West’s laconic response to terror. Other cities will pay in future, regardless of whether Europe closes its borders or the fate of Syria. In the words of Churchill: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on 16 November 2016.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-51548803673888963992015-10-26T04:35:00.002-07:002015-10-26T04:35:44.441-07:00Why does Lockerbie rhyme with irony?The Daily Star<br />Monday, October 26 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br /> <br />Oh the irony. What are we to make of news last week that Scottish prosecutors suddenly want to interview two Libyans they have identified as “new suspects” in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, in which 270 people were killed? <br /><br />The short answer is not much. <br /><br />One reason is that the suspects are hardly new. Both men were of interest to the original investigation in 1991. Abdullah al-Senussi, a former Libyan intelligence chief and brother in law of Moammar Gadhafi, was convicted in absentia by a French court in 1999 after having been found guilty of involvement in the bombing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989. How ironic is that? He is currently on death row in Tripoli for crimes committed by the Gadhafi regime.<br /><br />The other suspect, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Tripoli for bomb-making. Masud was almost indicted for the Pan Am bombing in 1991, alongside Abdelbaset Ali Megrahi, the former head of security at Libyan Arab Airlines and the only person convicted of the atrocity.<br /><br />Masud is also thought to have been involved in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986 frequented by American military personnel. The attack led to U.S. airstrikes against Libya soon thereafter. Ironically, and depending on your point of view, this is what led to the bombing of Pan Am 103.<br /><br />But the chances of either man appearing in a Scottish court are slim. The Tripoli-based General National Congress, backed by Islamist extremists and not recognized by the West, controls the fate of both men. It’s unlikely they will be extradited, and hard to see anyone volunteering to travel to Tripoli to interview them.<br /><br />The conviction of Megrahi, who died in 2012, three years after he was released from a life sentence “on compassionate grounds,” was based on the theory that Gadhafi had ordered the bombing in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes against Libya.<br /><br />Gadhafi admitted responsibility in 2003, but this was always seen as an economically pragmatic move, rather than an admission of guilt. A former Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, said as far back as 2005 that the decision to accept responsibility was to “buy peace and move forward.”<br /><br />Another irony is that while the authorities insist the investigation into the bombing remains “ongoing,” the Scottish judiciary recently refused a request from some of the relatives of victims to hear an appeal against Megrahi’s conviction that would have allowed new evidence to be presented in court.<br /><br />The legal case against Megrahi had more holes in it than Swiss cheese. His early release from jail in 2009, after being convicted of the biggest mass murders in British history, only added to the bad smell around the entire case.<br /><br />The key witness against Megrahi, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, was given a $2 million reward for his evidence by the CIA and a place in a witness-protection program. Gauci, who even the Scottish prosecutor who indicted Megrahi described as being “an apple short of a picnic,” is now understood to be living in Australia.<br /><br />It’s worth remembering that in October 1988, two months before the Pan Am bombing, German police raided an apartment in Frankfurt and arrested several Palestinians. The raid unearthed explosives, weapons and, crucially, a number of radio cassette recorders similar to the one used to detonate the Pan Am 103 bomb. Most of the Palestinians were members of the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmad Jibril, a Palestinian former Syrian Army officer. Jibril has spent recent years defending the regime of President Bashar Assad. He was reported to have been killed in August although this has since been denied.<br /><br />Much of the evidence indicates Jibril and the PFLP-GC carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran and Syria to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by a U.S. warship, killing 290 people. This is backed up by evidence from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the PFLP-GC was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing. The DIA also claimed that Jibril was given a down payment of $100,000 in Damascus by Iran’s then-ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hussan Akhari.<br /><br />Many believe then-Syrian President Hafez Assad’s support for the U.S.-led alliance to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 meant Syria’s role in the bombing was swept under the carpet. It is worth pointing out that Megrahi was not formally indicted by the United States and the United Kingdom until November 1991.<br /><br />But the PFLP-GC is not the only non-Libyan suspect. The Frankfurt raid also revealed compelling evidence against Muhammad Abu Talib, a former leader of the Palestine People’s Struggle Front. Oddly enough Talib was released from a life sentence he was serving in Sweden for involvement in bomb attacks weeks after Megrahi’s release in 2009.<br /><br />Finally, given that the authorities remain keen to pursue the Libyan angle, it is odd they spent so little time interviewing Gadhafi’s former spymaster Moussa Koussa when he fled to London as the regime was collapsing in 2011. Koussa, who in the words of one British government official was “up to his neck” in the bombing, spent just three days in London and then flew on to Qatar, where he remains, living on assets that were quietly unfrozen by the West around the same time. Oh the irony.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this articles appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on October 26 2015.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-78514232660778247742015-09-18T09:10:00.000-07:002015-09-18T09:10:19.012-07:00Britain adds to the anti-ISIS futilityThe Daily Star<br />Friday,September 18 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br /><br />A recent biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that the United Kingdom’s top soldier complained that discussing Syria with Cameron and his government in 2012 was rather like talking to children.<br />In colorful language, Gen. Sir David Richards, who was chief of defense staff at the time, said Cameron lacked “the balls” to put “boots on the ground” in Syria. He added that if Cameron had listened to him back then, ISIS would have effectively been strangled at birth.<br /><br />On one level you can’t blame Cameron for not taking the general’s advice. Richards is one of those tipped to be heavily criticized when, and if, the long-delayed report of the Chilcot inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war is ever published. And let’s face it, the British military made plenty of mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan.<br /><br />But the general also has a point. While it’s impossible to say with any certainty that earlier intervention in Syria would have prevented the spread of ISIS, or the wider bloodbath of the last four years, standing on the sidelines has hardly proved a success.<br />Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed by the regime of President Bashar Assad in the last four years, while thousands more have perished at the hands of ISIS. Its affiliates have terrorized Europe, and the entire Middle East, from Tunisia to Yemen, has been destabilized. Western European unity is creaking under the weight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the turmoil and the human carnage.<br /><br />Cameron’s “child-like” understanding of the Syrian crisis has been sorely tested in recent weeks as he faced intense scrutiny in the wake of the refugee crisis and following his announcement this month that a Royal Air Force drone had targeted and killed two British ISIS fighters near Raqqa in August. A third British extremist was killed in a U.S. airstrike at around the same time.<br />The U.K. has used killer drones in Afghanistan, a declared conflict zone. However, the attack in Syria was the first time it has deployed them in a country with which, and in which, the U.K. was not at war.<br /><br />Cameron said the strikes were designed to foil terror attacks planned by the two men in the U.K. He insisted the action did not mark wider British involvement in coalition airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria, a step that would require parliamentary approval. However, Cameron is poised to call a vote in Parliament within weeks in a bid to gain authorization to launch such airstrikes. He also warned last week that removing ISIS would require “not just spending money, not just aid, not just diplomacy, but will on occasion require hard military force.”<br /><br />There is nothing really new in this. Cameron has been keen to expand British airstrikes to Syria for some time. Along with the killing of the two British ISIS fighters, Royal Air Force personnel have already taken part in bombing raids over the country while embedded with U.S. and Canadian forces.<br /><br />This partly marks a belief within the intelligence services that terror attacks, such as the one that took place in Sousse in Tunisia in June in which 30 Britons were killed, are being planned in Raqqa – although the Tunisian shooting clearly owes more to Libyan instability than to events in Syria.<br /><br />But the sudden step-up in rhetoric is also a knee-jerk reaction to the refugee crisis engulfing Western Europe. The British chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, Cameron’s effective deputy, said the only way to stop the flow of refugees was to end the Syrian conflict. Though his comment avoided the war in Iraq and the terrible state of Libya and Afghanistan, it was belated recognition that the Syrian civil war has reached a stalemate.<br /><br />In a move to break the stalemate, and amid what is clearly a buildup of Russian troops in Syria, Cameron’s big idea is centered on the U.K.’s extending its military strikes against the “controlling brains” of ISIS, alongside a diplomatic push with Iran and Russia that would see Assad remain in power for a transitional period of six months while some form of national government can be formed to take power.<br /><br />Whether Iran and Russia are ready to consign Assad to the dustbin of history remains questionable. Both are deeply suspicious that the West could use military action against ISIS as cover for removing Assad. Hence British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond’s bizarre comment that RAF airstrikes in Syria would be prohibited from targeting areas where the civil war is raging.<br /><br />The caveats are fast diluting an already watered-down strategy that looks as ill conceived as Cameron’s last failed attempt to get parliamentary approval for British airstrikes in Syria two years ago. That time Assad was the target, this time he looks set to be the beneficiary.<br /><br />But the real question is whether the military action being considered against ISIS will have any practical impact. The largely token U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS, supported by a handful of RAF Tornados and even smaller contingents from other Western and Arab nations, have contained some ISIS activities, but have had little real impact on its murderous acts.<br /><br />ISIS may now control marginally less territory, but despite the airstrikes it has still been able to capture key cities, most notably Palmyra in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq. Dropping a few more bombs on ISIS in Syria is no substitute for a military strategy to eradicate its evil. To paraphrase General Richards, despite the tough talk, Cameron is still lacking in the cojones department.<br /><i><br />Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 18, 2015.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-87574574534660522312015-09-04T09:17:00.000-07:002015-09-04T09:17:41.876-07:00On and on the Chilcot inquiry goes The Daily Star<br />Friday, September 4 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />It’s hard to imagine that the long-running government inquiry into why the United Kingdom went to war in Iraq in 2003 could descend into greater absurdity. But, gentle reader, it has.<br /> <br />The Chilcot inquiry, led by career civil servant Sir John Chilcot, was charged with finding out what went wrong with the prewar intelligence analysis and post-invasion planning in Iraq, and identify “what lessons could be learned.” The inquiry, which began its deliberations in 2009 and finished taking evidence in February 2011, is now in its sixth year, and there appears to be no prospect of it ever being completed.<br /><br />Last week the government was forced to deny it was launching an inquiry into why the inquiry was taking so long. That followed the revelation that a number of those criticized in Chilcot’s draft report are trying to get the criticism expunged on the basis that their “human rights” will be violated by the inquiry’s findings.<br /><br />This sordid move, by those whose actions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and resulted in the real violation of the human rights of many more, stems from a fear that Chilcot’s final report could leave them vulnerable to prosecution under the Human Rights Act or some other international legal proceedings.<br /><br />The shameful maneuver reminded me of the words of the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift, the author “Gulliver’s Travels,” who said: “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”<br /> <br />It is understood that two of the most senior military and intelligence figures facing criticism in the report are Gen. Sir Nick Houghton, the current chief of the defense staff, who was a senior officer in Baghdad, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, who was largely responsible for the now infamous “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s military capability.<br /><br />Politicians expecting criticism include former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, both in power at the time of the invasion. Inquiry sources have indicated that the conduct of former Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon and former International Development Secretary Clare Short will also be mentioned.<br /><br />Prime Minister David Cameron called on Chilcot to set a timetable for publication of report. Cameron is keen to get the report published partly because it will criticize a Labour government, but also because senior colleagues have warned him he cannot contemplate a parliamentary vote to expand Britain’s bombing raids against ISIS targets in Syria unless the lessons of Iraq have been fully aired and the public sees they will be learned.<br /><br />But Chilcot continues to insist his report, which is thought to run to more than 1 million words, is still “not ready.” The glacial pace of Chilcot’s inquiry has been brought to a complete stop by the so-called “Maxwellization” process – a convention by which witnesses to an inquiry are informed of criticism in advance and given the chance to respond.<br /><br />This dubious process has been going on for at least a year and there is still no end in sight. It is stating the obvious to say that Maxwellization defeats the purpose of any inquiry, which must surely be about finding out what happened without fear or favor. The continuing delays caused by granting key figures a right of reply means the Chilcot inquiry has now become tainted by the same suspicion of cover-up as the war itself.<br /><br />The U.K.’s former top prosecution lawyer, Lord Macdonald, succinctly summed up the problem recently when he said that the decision to offer a right of reply was “gifting the prize of control over the inquiry’s timetable to its subjects.”<br /><br />Effectively what has happened is that the people who are most responsible for the debacle in Iraq have been allowed to hijack the inquiry and abuse a dubious convention to amend its findings and protect their reputations. Ironically, the process of Maxwellization takes its name from the newspaper owner and one-time Labour parliamentarian Robert Maxwell, who in 1971 was criticized in a government report as unfit to exercise “proper stewardship” of a public quoted company. Maxwell went to court insisting he had not been allowed to respond to the criticism before the report was published. The judge said the government had “virtually committed the business murder” of Maxwell, and from then on inquiries began to give prior notice of critical findings in advance.<br /><br />But more importantly, the British Court of Appeal in 1974 overruled Maxwell’s initial court victory and stated it was not necessary for those conducting inquiries “to put their tentative conclusions to the witnesses in order to give them an opportunity to refute them.” So why on Earth has this sordid process been used so extensively in Chilcot’s inquiry? <br /><br />Small wonder families of British soldiers killed in Iraq are threatening to take legal action against Chilcot if he fails to publish his findings by the end of this year. Chilcot is due to contact the families of dead soldiers, and is expected to tell them he will not be able to publish his report until next year at the earliest. Even then his final report will not reveal the names of those who have used Maxwellization, nor will we know to what extent Chilcot has diluted his findings in response to their objections. Think about that.<br /><br />It means we will have spent over six years and $16 million on an inquiry that is patently incapable of revealing the entire truth behind what is considered to be the most colossal British foreign policy blunder in modern history. Not even the playwright Samuel Becket could have imagined a more absurd scenario.<br /><br />Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.<br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-75327109595409646532015-07-17T07:45:00.000-07:002015-07-17T07:45:13.502-07:00Britain’s anti-ISIS actions are futileThe Daily Star<br />Friday, July 10 2015.<br />By Michael Glackin <br /><br /> <br />Insanity doesn’t just run through politics, it positively gallops. How else do you explain theBritish government’s reaction to the massacre of its citizens in Tunisia last month?<br /><br />Seifeddine Rezgui, an ISIS gunman trained in Libya, slaughtered 38 innocent tourists, including 30 British nationals, on the beach in Sousse. What was the government’s response? To “consider” extending its pitifully token contribution to the U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS targets and allow British aircraft to bomb the terror group’s strongholds in Syria. It has been bombing targets in Iraq since September.<br /><br />This is the sum total of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s promised “full spectrum” of responses to the Tunisian atrocity. And even this pitiful response will require a parliamentary vote, so British airstrikes against ISIS in Syria are unlikely to commence until the autumn at the earliest. It is an expedient political response that is utterly meaningless.<br /><br />The United Kingdom currently has eight Tornado jets taking part in the bombing campaign on ISIS targets in Iraq. At best, extending British operations to Syria will add but a mere handful to that number. It is a token addition to an already risible effort to smash ISIS.<br /><br />Don’t just take my word for it. Crispin Blunt, chairman of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said last week that only 5 percent of the anti-ISIS missions flown in the region were carried out by British aircraft. Other experts insist the figure is less than 4 percent. Blunt added that extending British strikes into Syria would make “no practical difference” to the air campaign against ISIS.<br /><br />The reality is that the government’s lame response to the attack in Tunisia is part of a wider political picture. Cameron is mindful of criticism, particularly from Washington, that the U.K. is a fast-fading power that is no longer willing to pull its military weight in international affairs. During last month’s G-7summit in Germany, U.S. President Barack Obama privately pressed Cameron for guarantees he would maintain British defense spending above the NATO benchmark of 2 percent of GDP. Cameron has steadfastly refused to commit to this.<br /><br />The government believes expanding the U.K.’s abysmal contribution to the anti-ISIS airstrikes in Syria will allay some of the criticism. It also provides yet another fig leaf to cover the reality that there is no overall plan for defeating ISIS, whether in London or in Washington.<br /><br />Ironically, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond inadvertently indicated what the government, and indeed the West, needs to do in response to the killings in Tunisia when he said the spread of ISIS into the “ungoverned territory” of Libya had helped sow the seeds for the atrocity in Sousse.<br /><br />Tunisia’s interior minister, Rafik Chelli, confirmed Rezgui visited Libya in January, traveling and training with the group of terrorists who carried out the attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis earlier this year in which 20 people were killed. Rezgui made a further visit to Libya in March, just before the Bardo murders.<br /><br />You don’t have to be a critic of the rudderless foreign policies of Cameron and Obama to appreciate that the West’s “intervention lite” in Libya has come back to haunt it. The “ungovernable territory” is a direct consequence of the West’s failure to follow up its role in the ousting of Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Its conspicuous absence in post-Gadhafi Libya created the vacuum that allowed terror and lawlessness to prosper, enabling people like Rezgui to hone their deadly craft.<br /><br />What Cameron should be outlining now is how he intends to address his government’s failings in Libya and what economic and security support the U.K., France, the U.S. and the Gulf nations can now provide to those struggling amid the chaos to establish democracy.<br /><br />Second, the targeting of Tunisia was not an accident. Two years ago a suicide bomber thought to be linked to the same ISIS cell as Rezgui’s died at the Sousse resort after his bomb exploded prematurely.<br /><br />Because Tunisia is the one nation in the region to emerge from the Arab spring with a democracy, the terrorist attack was as much about crushing all that the country has achieved in recent years as it was about killing Westerners.<br /><br />Tunisia’s tourism industry accounts for around 15 percent of the country’s GDP. The Tunisian government has warned of losses totaling $500 million as Western tour companies cancelled booked trips in the wake of the attack. Such losses could have a fatal impact on an important economic sector, one that has helped underpin Tunisia’s shift to democracy.<br /><br />Cameron should lead the way in getting a firm commitment from other Western powers to back Tunisia with investment and make up the shortfall it will face from those canceled holidays. However, while soft power initiatives can help in the long term, the time has also come for the West to admit its current operations against ISIS have been a failure.<br /><br />Since the U.S.-led bombing campaign started last year ISIS has lost some ground, primarily in Tikrit, around Mount Sinjar, and along the Syrian border with Turkey. But it has gained elsewhere, most notably winning control of Ramadi and the area around the historic city of Palmyra.<br /><br />Meanwhile, on the same day as the massacre in Tunisia, groups linked to ISIS bombed a Shiite mosque in Kuwait killing 27, and last week fought a bloody battle with the Egyptian army in the northern Sinai peninsula. Against this backdrop the West must give proper consideration to expanding its role beyond increasingly fruitless airstrikes.<br /><br />Too much of the heavy lifting against ISIS has been left to a demoralized Iraqi army and (largely Iranian-controlled) Shiite militias. The time has come when the West must take a decision to face and resist terrorism with the “full spectrum” of its military means, and that must mean “boots on the ground.”<br /><br />It really is a sign of insanity to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. ISIS needs to be tackled at its source.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on July 10,2015.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-59376397459920434042015-06-17T14:14:00.000-07:002015-06-17T14:14:20.004-07:00 The unbearable lightness of being BlairThe Daily Star<br />Friday, June 5, 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />It perhaps says something about the importance Tony Blair attached to his role as envoy for the Middle East Quartet that when I contacted his office this week to ask what he considered his main achievement during his eight years in office, no one bothered to respond.<br /><br />It’s a pity because, while the short answer is not much, the failure is attributable less to Blair than to the Quartet itself.<br /><br />There is a danger in playing Devil’s advocate. Blair shares a great deal of responsibility for the murderous mayhem that has enveloped the Middle East in the last decade. But though I speak as a long-standing critic, particularly of his role as envoy, some of the criticism since he announced that he was stepping down from the position has been utterly ridiculous.<br /><br />Blair was the toothless representative of a collection of global powers – the European Union, the United Nations, Russia and the United States – that failed to invest any of their considerable political capital in resolving Israel’s five-decade-old occupation of Palestinian lands. It is the wider political process that did not deliver, and, without that, Blair’s efforts, for all his grubby tardiness in remaining in a fruitless role for eight years, were always going to lead nowhere.<br /><br />The Quartet members lost interest in trying to re-energize a moribund peace process that was broken long before the misery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was dwarfed by events in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. As far back as 2008, regional NGOs warned about the Quartet’s lack of progress and called on its members to “signal strong opposition to continued settlement expansion” by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.<br /><br />Nothing happened.<br /><br />More recently, in 2012, a report by the Brookings Institution said the Quartet had “little to show for its decadelong involvement in the peace process.” In the end Blair became a lightning rod for this inertia. His extremely narrow remit – to promote economic development and help improve governance in the occupied Palestinian territories – meant he was never in a position to influence political events. He was so peripheral to the decision-making process that he wasn’t even invited to the last ministerial-level meeting of the Quartet last February.<br /><br />And yet, Blair was hardly on a fool’s errand. Being envoy put the diplomat cum multimillionaire businessman center stage in Middle East diplomacy, while he conducted lucrative private deals with regional governments with which he dealt on Quartet missions. Blair’s global consultancy, which offers investment and strategic advice to governments and corporations, includes among its clients PetroSaudi, an oil company with links to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the Kuwait government, and the Abu Dhabi wealth fund Mubadala. Since being appointed envoy, Blair is estimated to have amassed between $75 million and $150 million, although he insists the figure is much lower.<br /><br />This inevitably led to accusations of conflicts of interest. It has also tarnished Blair’s few small successes as envoy. He succeeded in getting the Israeli government to release radio frequencies which enabled cell phone company Wataniya Mobile to operate in the West Bank, allowing competition with larger rival Jawwal. He also lobbied Israel to allow the British energy firm BG Group and Palestinian officials to establish Gaza Marine, a long stalled $1 billion offshore drilling project.<br /><br />But both Wataniya Mobile and BG Group were clients of U.S. investment giant JP Morgan at the time – the bank that also pays Blair around $3 million a year to act as its consultant. Oddly enough, I suspect this creative multitasking doesn’t overly concern many in the region. However, it is the fig-leaf nature of Blair’s former office, that it was established to provide a shroud to cover the absence of progress to resolve Israel’s long occupation of Palestinian territories, that rankles with many, and his willingness to play along with it for so long.<br /><br />Blair’s other minor successes included his part in opening up the Allenby crossing, which enabled Palestinian businessmen easier access to Jordan. But that success, and a handful of others like it, must be set against the more than 500 other Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks that remain in place.<br /><br />The economies of the West Bank and Gaza are in a dire state, and private investment continues to be well below standard levels in other small developing countries. A World Bank report last month reiterated that the primary factor strangling growth in Gaza and the West Bank is Israeli restrictions.<br /><br />While one can argue that Ramallah is reasonably prosperous, thanks to foreign aid, Israel retains control over 60 percent of the West Bank. That means prospects for any real investment and the expansion of the private sector are extremely limited.<br /><br />Even before last summer’s Gaza war, one in six Palestinians in the West Bank was jobless and one out of two in Gaza.<br /><br />But the central problem, and the one Blair faced from the outset, is that there isn’t anything that resembles a workable and effective political framework to improve the plight of the Palestinians. His remit, to start building a Palestinian state “from the bottom up while it is being negotiated from the top down,” was laughable. There were no meaningful “top down” negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel at any point during his time as envoy.<br /><br />King Abdullah II of Jordan succinctly summed up the attitude of the Israeli government in 2011 with his pithy remark: “Israel is not really interested in a two-state solution, and what is the other option?” Add in the infighting within the Palestinian leadership, the death knell for any hope of reform after the sacking of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2013, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of illegal settlements, and you have to wonder why anyone thought Blair, even without the baggage of his record in the region, could make a difference.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on June 05, 2015, on page 7.<br /></i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-83964297827455275782015-05-19T03:29:00.000-07:002015-05-19T03:29:01.753-07:00A Lawrence of Arabia Cameron won’t beThe Daily Star<br />Tuesday, May 19, 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />The headline in London’s Financial Times neatly captured how important British Prime Minister David Cameron’s election victory will be for the Middle East. According to the newspaper, Cameron’s surprise outright win, ending his need for a coalition with the smaller Liberal Democrats, “reignited London’s property market.” Middle East buyers were leading the charge to purchase multimillion-dollar homes within hours of the results.<br /><br />And that, I would suggest, will be the extent of this election’s impact on the Middle East. Since Cameron’s humiliation in the disastrous House of Commons vote in 2013, when Parliament vetoed his attempt to launch a limited missile strike against President Bashar Assad’s regime, he has avoided foreign affairs.<br /><br />In the face of Russian revanchism and the increasing mayhem spreading across the Middle East, Cameron has been invisible. None of this will change under his new government. <br /><br />It’s a far cry from Cameron’s tub thumping appearances in Egypt, just days after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and months later in Libya, after Moammar Gadhafi was toppled. Today, Cameron’s determination to stand aloof from the shambles that Libya has become is most clearly seen in his new government’s attitude to the North African and Middle Eastern migrants dying in their thousands in the Mediterranean, most of whom are victims of Libya-based people-trafficking gangs.<br /><br />Within days of the election, Home Secretary Theresa May firmly ruled out British participation in a European Union quota scheme to resettle the migrants – most of whom landed in Italy or Greece – among the bloc’s 28 member states. She insisted that the plan would only “encourage” more migrants to try to reach Europe and called on the EU to send them back to the shores of Libya from whence they came.<br /><br />It’s an improvement on the previous policy of allowing the migrants to drown in the Mediterranean. <br /><br />But considering the United Kingdom’s responsibility for the current mayhem in Libya, not to mention Syria, from where many of the migrants have traveled, it is shameful. In fact only 143 of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees have been resettled in the U.K. Based on May’s comments that number is extremely unlikely to increase under the new government.<br /><br />On the wider regional front, Cameron will continue to avoid getting involved in a strategy to tackle problems arising from the so-called “failed-state wars” in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, or the increasing extremism and sectarian violence they have unleashed. The U.K. will also remain a marginal contributor to the air campaign against ISIS.<br /><br />The new government will however introduce tougher anti-terrorism laws at home, including the “snoopers’ charter,” which will dramatically increase the security services’ already extensive surveillance powers.<br /><br />The British government will, of course, be involved in negotiating the final terms of a potential nuclear accord with Iran as part of the P5+1 group of powers. If a deal with Tehran is finalized, it is likely to result in wider negotiations on regional security. This will have far-reaching consequences for the West’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, as well as Iran and its proxies, in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. But it is, frankly, laughable to talk of a regional security deal that would see the U.K. becoming one of the guarantors of a U.S.-led security system for the Gulf states, with the Western powers pledging to respond to any military attack against its Gulf allies.<br /><br />Based on the recent actions of both London and Washington, and even allowing for Saudi Arabia being the U.K.’s most lucrative arms market, such a guarantee would be token at best, and most likely worthless. After all, the U.K. (along with the United States and Russia) is a guarantor of Ukrainian sovereignty through the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and that has offered scant comfort to Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Cameron will continue to refuse to support tougher measures to hold Israel accountable for illegal West Bank settlement building. His bizarre and contradictory position of supporting a two-state solution while insisting a Palestine state should not be recognized until it is “most useful to the peace process” will not change.<br /><br />Ultimately, Cameron’s priorities will be keeping the U.K. together in the face of the huge surge in support for the Scottish Nationalist Party, which wants Scotland to be independent. Oddly enough, the SNP, now the U.K.’s third largest party, is the only mainstream political group that supports the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state and has called on the government to upgrade the political representation of Palestine in the U.K. to a fully functioning embassy.<br /><br />However, while the SNP won almost all the Scottish seats in the British Parliament, and controls the separate Scottish Parliament, it has absolutely no influence over British foreign policy.<br /><br />Membership of the EU will be the other defining issue of British politics, ahead of a referendum on the matter, which Cameron has committed to hold by 2017. The prime minister, who will campaign for the U.K. to remain in the EU, will have to devote all his energies to renegotiating the terms of Britain’s membership to convince voters to back his position.<br /><br />Meanwhile, as the Middle East continues to unravel, the well-heeled at least can look forward to purchasing an up-market London bolt hole. The rest, particularly those refugees scattered across Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq, will have to learn to live with Britain’s Middle East inertia.<br /><i><br />Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based daily newspaper THE DAILY STAR.A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on May 19, 2015, on page 7.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-83758437706657998702015-04-29T06:49:00.000-07:002015-04-29T06:49:43.568-07:00In fighting terrorism, Britain is abandoning its liberal valuesThe Daily Star<br />Friday, April 17, 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />It says something about the world we now live in that we know more about Mullah Omar’s terror plans, despite the fact he has been in hiding for the last decade, than about someone who has undergone the scrutiny of two criminal trials at London’s Old Bailey, arguably the world’s most famous courthouse.<br /><br />Thanks to the Afghan Taliban’s publication of Mullah Omar’s bizarre biography on April 6, we know about his love of grenade launchers, particularly the RPG-7, his “preferred weapon of choice,” and his future plans for Afghanistan.<br /><br />If only we knew as much about the plans of the man whom British security and intelligence agencies believe poses such a grave risk to the national security of the United Kingdom that details of his arrest, terrorist plots and trials must be kept secret.<br /><br />You may recall the case of Erol Incedal, a British national, who has twice stood trial on terrorism charges since being arrested at gunpoint in 2013. In an unprecedented move, the British government had attempted to hold both trials in secret, in the interests of “national security.” Following a legal challenge by media groups a compromise was arranged in which the trial was divided into three parts: public, in other words open to media and members of the public; private, with 10 “accredited journalists” allowed to attend but banned from reporting what they saw or heard; and closed, meaning completely secret, with just the accused, lawyers and the jury present.<br /><br />Last year Incedal was convicted of possessing a bomb-making document on a mobile phone memory card. But the jury failed to reach a verdict on the more serious charge of planning a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS. This included allegedly targeting former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and plotting a “Mumbai-style” attack in London.<br /><br />After a second trial, even more of which was held in secret and which ended last month, a jury finally acquitted Incedal of that charge. This came after police and security agencies admitted that they had no idea what his alleged terror target was.<br /><br />Following his acquittal Incedal was jailed on April 1 for three and a half years on the earlier charge of possessing the bomb-making document, a shorter sentence than the average house burglar receives. His friend, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, who last year pleaded guilty to being in possession of an identical document, was jailed for three years. Having already spent 17 months on remand both men are likely to be free within months. The situation is beyond farce. What on earth was all this secrecy about?<br /><br />Sentencing the two men, the judge, Mr. Justice Nicol, actually told them that they were not terrorists, but added that parliament had made possessing instructions for homemade bombs an offense because of the danger of their being in circulation.<br /><br />So we can’t even call this a secret terror trial anymore. It’s just a sordid secret trial where the entire weight of the government has been used to ride roughshod over the principle of open justice, for no apparent reason. Considering that what the jury heard convinced them that Incedal was not plotting terror attacks, and bearing in mind the lengths to which the government went to keep this trial a secret, it must surely be in the national interest to know why Incedal has been cleared of being a terrorist.<br /><br />This is the crux of the matter because we have no idea what really lay at the heart of Incedal’s prosecution in the first place, let alone the reason for all the secrecy that surrounded his case. Here is a man who has been found guilty of possessing a bomb-making manual, but whom two separate juries, who saw all the evidence, failed to convict of planning terror attacks.<br /><br />It even emerged that Incedal had been in contact with a British extremist known as “Ahmed,” whom he had met on the border between Turkey and Syria. And yet the jury still cleared him. Why? We don’t know.<br /><br />Amid all these questions we are faced with a government that has developed a worrying obsession with secrecy and the control of information – one that treats its laughingly inept security and intelligence services with mad devotion. The government appears to be in awe of the security services, and will do anything they ask without question.<br /><br />We have seen this in the abject failure of parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee to criticize myriad intelligence failures or the acknowledged illegal activities of the service. The Incedal trial represents yet another erosion of freedom of expression in the U.K., from the pervasive snooping of the security services into our emails, to the government attacks on the media, which has seen more journalists put on trial than terrorists in recent years.<br /><br />The final bizarre twist in this sorry affair came when Mr. Justice Nicol rejected a post-trial application brought by media to make the case details public now that the trial was over and there no longer was a need for secrecy.<br /><br />Predictably, Nicol handed down two judgments, one open, and one secret. His open judgment ruled that prosecutors could be dissuaded from bringing such a case in the future if reporting restrictions were lifted. Why? The reason was detailed in the accompanying secret judgment, which of course, we cannot read.<br /><br />This is a pathetic way to defend the values of freedom and democracy. Former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said we have nothing to fear but fear itself.<br /><br />It is sound advice, because the greatest threat to British values and freedoms just now is from hysteria, not terrorists.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former Managing Editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 17, 2015, on page 7.</i><br /><br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-20711909506478219252015-04-11T09:01:00.001-07:002015-04-11T09:01:26.297-07:00Echoes of Orwell in the United KingdomThe Daily Star<br />Monday, March 23, 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece “1984,” described a world of omnipresent government surveillance of its citizens. A world in which the rulers even invented a new language, Newspeak, in order to distort the true meaning of words and suppress dissent. Orwell’s novel, published in 1949, was largely, though not entirely, based on the regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But today his nightmare vision of society has worrying parallels with the shocking extent of the British government’s intrusion into our day-to-day lives.<br /><br />The British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee officially confirmed last week that the government was engaged in mass surveillance of the communications of millions of people. But in a long-awaited report into the revelations made by U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden two years ago, the ISC insisted this intrusive surveillance carried out by intelligence agencies was perfectly legal.<br /><br />That’s because the intelligence services’ trawling of the emails, text messages and other online communications of law-abiding individuals isn’t actually mass surveillance. In a nod to Orwell’s Newspeak, the ISC prefers to call it “bulk interception” and “bulk collection.” As someone who has been embarrassed by the fact that I speak one language, I am now ashamed to discover I don’t even understand the language I thought I could speak.<br /><br />According to the ISC, bulk interception or collection only becomes surveillance when the information is read by a human. Because most of the vast amounts of material collected by GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, are never actually read by anyone, it doesn’t qualify as mass surveillance.<br /><br />But why collect information if you are not going to read it? Surely if any of the content is being stored it increases the likelihood that it will be accessed at some point? The ISC report insists that GCHQ only stores a small amount of the material it intercepts, but the exact figure is redacted so we have no idea how much is being held, or how long it is kept by the intelligence agencies.<br /><br />The intelligence services insist they need to do all this, and much more, because they are searching for small needles of information about terrorists in the vast haystack of online communications. But as the record shows, and as The Guardian newspaper neatly put it, the biggest security problem appears to be the abject failure of the intelligence agencies to hold on to all the needles they pull out of haystacks.<br /><br />Lest we forget, despite all its online snooping, the intelligence services failed to prevent a number of atrocities in the United Kingdom – from the London bombings of 2005 to the murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 – despite the fact that the perpetrators in both cases were on the radar of intelligence services. Mohammed Emwazi, better known as ISIS killer Jihadi John, would not be in Syria butchering Westerners were it not for the intelligence services allowing him to escape from the U.K. while he was under their scrutiny.<br /><br />By any sane rationale, these failures make the case for a better organized intelligence service. But in the twisted Orwellian prism of the government and the ISC they add up instead to increasing the powers of the spooks to collect Internet data on the rest of us, creating more hay for them to trawl through.<br /><br />The ISC has essentially given the spooks the benefit of the doubt over the legality of their surveillance. They won’t need to in future, because the government intends to formally legalize the practice, or in the committee’s Newspeak, make the process more “transparent.”<br /><br />Yet while calling for more transparency, the ISC also flatly rejected demands that a judge, rather than a government minister, should be responsible for authorizing the warrants – of which there were 517,236 issued last year – allowing “intrusive surveillance.” The mantra, repeatedly trotted out by government, is that the innocent have nothing to fear from its snooping.<br /><br />That’s a lie. On the same day that the ISC was busy recommending more transparency, the government was busy trying to keep secret the extent of the intelligence services’ unlawful behavior. Almost unnoticed last week, lawyers acting for GCHQ, MI5, and MI6, insisted that the agencies should not have to admit whether they intercepted legally privileged conversations between lawyers and their clients.<br /><br />The demand was made during a case before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal brought by the Libyan politician Abdel-Hakim Belhadj and his family. They were seized in a British-American rendition operation in 2004 and returned to be tortured by Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Tripoli.<br /><br />The IPT deals with complaints about the conduct of the intelligence services. Belhadj is currently suing the government over its role in his rendition. His lawyers believe the intelligence services eavesdropped on their confidential communications in order to give the government an unfair advantage in court.<br /><br />Belhadj is not a terrorist, and his court case against the government does not threaten the lives of British people. He is simply someone the government wants to silence, and based on the ISC report, that is enough for his communications with his lawyers to be legally intercepted.<br /><br />The intelligence services play a crucial role in protecting the United Kingdom. But there is no evidence that mass surveillance of our Internet activity is making us safer. On the contrary there is plenty of evidence that intelligence failures have cost lives. Giving mass surveillance a retrospective legal basis will not change this, whatever the government decides to call it.<br /><i><br />Michael Glackin,is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 23, 2015, on page 7.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-63895057457311707162015-03-04T10:47:00.000-08:002015-03-04T10:47:24.173-08:00Britain’s intelligence net needs repairsThe Daily Star<br />Monday, March 2, 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />It is hard not to fear for the defense of the realm these days. When the head of the government body charged with overseeing the British intelligence services is daft enough to be duped by reporters pretending to be directors of a fictitious Chinese company you really are in trouble.<br /><br />Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the powerful chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence Services Committee, along with a former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, one of the loudest cheerleaders for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, both offered to “use their influence” as senior politicians to help the fictitious company in return for payments of at least $7,500 per day.<br /><br />Rifkind, who was forced to resign as chair of the ISC following the revelations, told the undercover reporters he could arrange “useful access” to every British ambassador in the world. He said he could meet “any ambassador that I wish to see” in London. “They’ll all see me personally.”<br /><br />Luckily it was a bunch of reporters exposing his sordid avarice rather than a terrorist group posing as a fictitious company. The headlines could have been very different.<br /><br />With someone like this in charge of overseeing intelligence and security, it is unsurprising that the services themselves are facing criticism for being inept. The intelligence and security services consistently warn that the greatest threat to national security comes from British jihadis who become radicalized fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and who then return home bringing the violence they have learned to the streets of Britain.<br /><br />Yet intelligence and security services appear incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to Syria and Iraq in the first place, but even known terror suspects.<br /><br />The ISIS executioner known as “Jihadi John,” who was finally publicly named by the Washington Post last week as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, is a case in point. Emwazi, a 27-year-old from west London, was able to escape to Syria despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the United Kingdom. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.<br /><br />Yet the former University of Westminster computer student, who MI5 had linked to a number of Islamist terror groups including Al-Shabab, managed to slip out of the United Kingdom unnoticed in 2012 to join ISIS. He is the best known of an estimated 2,000 Britons thought to be fighting alongside Islamist extremists and butchering innocents in Syria and Iraq.<br /><br />The latest recruits appear to be three runaway schoolgirls from London. Clearly the intelligence services cannot monitor everyone, and, unlike Emwazi, the schoolgirls had no record of terrorism. However, one of the schoolgirls is believed to have been recruited through Twitter by Aqsa Mahmood, a so-called “jihadi bride” who fled Glasgow for Syria two years ago.<br /><br />Mahmood’s social media have been monitored by intelligence agencies ever since she disappeared. This is not lost on her family, who said the security services had “serious questions to answer” over her alleged contact with the missing schoolgirls.<br /><br />It gets worse. It is understood that the schoolgirls were also in contact via social media with a school friend who ran away to Syria in December. The government, not slow to see an opportunity, insisted that the case reinforced its argument to grant greater powers to the intelligence services so they could intercept social media and digital messages. Prime Minister David Cameron wants encrypted communication services such as WhatsApp and Snapchat to be opened up to the security services.<br /><br />But Steve Hewitt, an expert on security intelligence and counterterrorism at the University of Birmingham, recently told me that mass eavesdropping programs such as Tempora, through which GCHQ secretly gained access to millions of private communications, could actually be hampering intelligence work.<br /><br />“One of the issues raised by the Snowden disclosures is the vast amount of information the intelligence agencies take in. Frankly it is way too much, and they simply cannot process it all. They need to prioritize more,” Hewitt remarked.<br /><br />They sure do. Emwazi is merely the latest terror suspect of whom the intelligence services have lost sight, only to see him return to haunt them.<br /><br />Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Like Adebolajo, Emwazi has also claimed MI5 tried to recruit him.<br /><br />The leaders of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.<br /><br />These are systematic failings. Hewitt adds: “It’s inevitable that some suspects could slip through their net, and that the occasional lone attacker may not stay on their radar and then later emerge to attack someone. But ultimately that is preferable to hundreds being killed in a single incident, and the security services have successfully prevented those sort of terror attacks.”<br /><br />Maybe so, but as the old adage goes, the terrorists only have to get lucky once, and the more of them that are allowed to slip through the net, the luckier they are likely to be.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 2, 2015, on page 7.</i><br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-66842105612085937962015-02-19T12:09:00.003-08:002015-02-19T12:09:57.594-08:00A British inquiry descends into farceThe Daily Star<br />Friday, February 13 2015<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />The long-running, some would say never-ending, government inquiry into why the United Kingdom went to war in Iraq in 2003 officially descended into farce last week.<br /><br />The man in charge of the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, faced a parliamentary committee to explain why he has still not published his report into a war that took place more than a decade ago. Chilcot, a former civil servant who heads the five-member committee of inquiry that began its work in 2009, originally expected his $1,200 a day job to last two years at most. However, six years and $14 million later, there is no sign of him publishing even an interim report, or any hint that he might soon have to give up his well remunerated post.<br /><br />In truth the Chilcot inquiry was always a pointless exercise. The entire country blames former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s bizarre desperation to ingratiate himself with U.S. President George W. Bush for the U.K.’s joining a war that has cast a dark shadow across the entire Middle East.<br /><br />But few public inquiries in the U.K. achieve anything, and two previous inquiries into the Iraq war were widely seen as exercises in concealing the truth. Based on last week’s 70-minute performance by Chilcot in front of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, his inquiry will be no different.<br /><br />In a moment that could have come from a Marx Brothers film, the man who had to explain to Parliament why it was taking so long to publish his report, took so long to explain it that he had to be told to stop in order for parliamentarians to ask questions.<br /><br />Rumor has it Chilcot’s report so far runs to a million words, and, judging by his responses to the committee, it may well be impenetrable. For instance, when he told the committee that he still didn’t know when he would be ready to publish, he said: “The risk of either arousing false hopes or false expectations either way outweighs for me the powerful appetite, for all sorts of often good reasons, to know when the report is likely to become available.”<br /><br />A joke that’s been doing the rounds for years is that Chilcot is delaying the report until the main players are all dead. Ironically, his first words to the committee informed them that one of the members of his inquiry panel, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, had indeed died the previous night.<br /><br />You couldn’t make it up.<br /><br />Chilcot said the long delay was initially due to “very long and difficult and challenging discussions” with the U.K’s top civil servant over the release of secret government documents. These include the all-important 25 letters Blair sent to Bush, along with the transcripts of 130 telephone calls between the two men, in the run-up to the invasion. The cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, who was also Blair’s principal private secretary at the time of the invasion, refused to declassify the correspondence on national-security grounds.<br /><br />It’s ironic that a government that insists on the need to pry into millions of its citizens’ private emails and Skype conversations is so reluctant to allow its citizens a reciprocal right. Although a deal struck between Heywood and Chilcot now allows for the release of “selected extracts,” the reality is that the full details of these important public documents will remain secret.<br /><br />So, even if Chilcot does publish his report before we all die, we are unlikely to learn whether Blair really did write to Bush in July 2002: “You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I’m with you.” The letter, written a year before Parliament voted on whether Britain would join the invasion, was quoted in well-connected political journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s book “The End of the Party,” based on his interviews with David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser at the time, and Sir Christopher Meyer, then the British ambassador to the U.S.<br /><br />The tussle between Chilcot and the cabinet office over these documents meant the process by which those criticized in the report are given the right to respond before publication, known as “Maxwellization,” did not begin until the end of last year.<br /><br />This now appears to be the main obstacle to the report’s publication as speculation is rife that Blair, along with the former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and senior defense chiefs are attempting to water down criticism of their roles by challenging details and demanding changes.<br /><br />This covert bartering is an affront to the very principles of democracy and open government that the invasion of Iraq was supposed to uphold. The Maxwellization process defeats the purpose of any inquiry, which must surely be about finding out what happened without fear or favor. Granting key figures in the decision to go to war a right of reply means the Chilcot inquiry is now rightly tainted by the same suspicion of cover-up as the war itself.<br /><br />The Chilcot Inquiry was always going to be a waste of time and money. The inquiry panel was made up of establishment figures that supported Blair. Chilcot was a key member of an earlier Iraq war investigation, the Butler Inquiry, which exonerated the Blair government of the charge that it had “sexed up” the case for war after the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – the original raison d’être for attacking Iraq.<br /><br />The late Sir Martin Gilbert supported the invasion and even claimed Bush and Blair would one day “join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Another member of the inquiry team, the academic Sir Lawrence Freedman, was a foreign policy adviser to Blair. He is also author of the five tests for military intervention used by Blair in a famous 1999 Chicago speech.<br /><br />The Iraq war and its chaotic, bloody aftermath cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilized the Middle East. It provided fertile ground for the growth of ISIS, poisoned the well of humanitarian intervention, and has destroyed the willingness of the U.K., and indeed the West, to deal with the conflict in Syria. And yet, a decade after the event that unleashed this maelstrom, there has been no proper scrutiny of the decision-making process that led to it. I suspect there never will be.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on February 13, 2015, on page 7.</i><br /><br /><br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-46385945729425278982014-12-31T08:46:00.000-08:002014-12-31T08:46:20.913-08:00Britain’s murky role in CIA tortureThe Daily Star<br />Tuesday, December 30 2014<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />Not long ago, in a bid to find out how effective the CIA really was at counterterrorism, U.S. President Barack Obama released a rabbit into a forest and challenged the agency to find it. The CIA spent months planting informers in the forest, interviewing forest creatures, and examining all the forest intelligence. Nothing. Finally the agency went into the forest and dragged out a soaking wet, badly beaten brown bear screaming: “Okay, okay! I’m a rabbit, I’m a rabbit!”<br /><br />Funny as this old joke is, it’s not nearly as funny as the news that the British body charged with investigating the U.K.’s complicity in the CIA’s torture of terrorism suspects between 2001 and 2009 was none other than Parliament’s hapless Intelligence and Security Committee.<br /><br />One of the many merits of the U.S. political system is that all branches and agencies of its government are held accountable by what is sometimes tenacious oversight by elected politicians. The Senate’s Intelligence Committee recently released a report on torture conducted by the CIA in the so-called war on terror. Its work hasn’t been perfect, but at least Americans now know the truth about the CIA’s torture program, and, it appears, the complicity of the administration of former President George W. Bush.<br /><br />However, we in the U.K. still do not know the extent of our government’s role in this sordid affair. And, if it is left to the feeble ISC to investigate, we never will.<br /><br />For years, the British government denied that its territory had been used for so-called “rendition” flights, in which terror suspects were illegally transported across the globe by the CIA to countries where they could be tortured. It also denied that British intelligence agencies had any involvement or knowledge of the CIA’s brutal program. The denials were supported by an ISC investigation in 2007 that gave the intelligence agencies and government a clean bill of health. The ISC reiterated its findings in 2010.<br /><br />Yet a steady drip of leaks and court actions has long contradicted both the government’s lofty denials and the ISC’s findings. For example, for more than a year now, police in Scotland have been investigating whether Scottish airports were used in rendition flights. This probe followed publication of research compiled by the Rendition Project, an academic program that has spent over four years tracking CIA rendition flights and found that 50 aircraft linked to renditions landed in Scotland between September 2001 and September 2006.<br /><br />But the U.K.’s involvement goes beyond providing a stopover for CIA torture flights. The U.K.’s legal authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, told me that on Dec. 16, London’s Metropolitan Police had handed over a file of evidence, the result of a three-year investigation titled Operation Lydd, into MI6 involvement in the kidnapping of Libyan activists in 2004.<br /><br />Police working on Operation Lydd even questioned Jack Straw, the former British foreign secretary, as a “witness” to the alleged abductions of two Libyans who claim they were handed over to Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s regime and tortured. This occurred at a time when the U.K. was trying to curry favor with the dictator.<br /><br />The CPS told me it was “now in a position to begin considering the material with a view to making a charging decision in due course.”<br /><br />It is worth pointing out that two years ago, despite government denials and the ISC’s findings, the government paid $3.5 million to one of the Libyan activists, Sami al-Saadi, and his family. This ended a longrunning legal action in which he claimed Straw had authorized his kidnapping in a joint U.K.-U.S.-Libyan operation.<br /><br />At the time, however, the Foreign Office insisted that the payment was not “an admission of liability.”<br /><br />The government has also spent more than $600,000 of taxpayers’ money trying to quash another case, brought by a Gadhafi opponent, Abdul Hakim Belhadj. Belhadj, whose pregnant wife was kidnapped with him, is understood to have turned down a $1.6 million settlement because it did not include an acceptance of guilt by the U.K.<br /><br />There is also the case of former Guantanamo Bay inmate Binyam Mohammed, who in 2011 received $1.6 million from the government in yet another out-of-court settlement. This came after he claimed he was tortured with the complicity of British intelligence agencies while illegally held in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan.<br /><br />We also know that U.K. intelligence agencies supplied information to the CIA’s torturers and were present at some of the torture sites. This last point has been substantiated by Lord West, a former Home Office minister and by Dr. James Mitchell, the man who devised and ran the CIA torture program.<br /><br />The Senate report insists the CIA program was ineffective in gaining information, but many will argue that the West cannot seek to occupy the moral high ground when its enemies film gruesome beheadings of their captives or throw them off high buildings.<br /><br />But it is the constant denials and barefaced lies of successive government officials that needs to be investigated, and with it the utter failure of the ISC to actually uncover any wrongdoing, or re-examine any of its failings amid police investigations, a plethora of court actions and multimillion-pound taxpayer-funded payoffs.<br /><br />An earlier inquiry into the torture allegations, launched four years ago and led by a former judge Sir Peter Gibson, questioned whether the U.K. had “a deliberate or agreed policy” to ignore the mistreatment of suspects. It sought to determine whether MI5 and MI6 operated a policy that would “condone, encourage or take advantage of rendition operations” carried out by other countries.<br /><br />The government promptly scrapped this inquiry before it was finished and asked the ISC to complete it. That was a year and a half ago and the ISC still hasn’t published its findings. Now the government has added the report on CIA torture to the ISC’s workload. You could be forgiven for thinking the British government isn’t keen for the truth to emerge. And that really isn’t funny at all.<br /><br /><i>Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 30, 2014, on page 7.</i>Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2438843819927333673.post-42979867447434741212014-12-02T04:30:00.000-08:002014-12-02T04:30:23.723-08:00The Daily Star<br />Tuesday, December 2 2014<br />By Michael Glackin<br /><br />Anyone seeking evidence of how far the United Kingdom has descended from a nation renowned for unblinking fortitude in the face of adversity to one now gripped by collective neurosis and hysteria, need look no further than two bizarre events that took place last week.<br /><br />First, police started handing out leaflets at railway stations informing commuters that in the event of an Islamist terror attack they should “Run, Hide, and Tell.” If that message wasn’t clear enough, the leaflets also contained images of terrified commuters running down stairs, cowering in darkened corners, and then anxiously calling someone on a mobile phone.<br /><br />It’s a long way from Winston’s Churchill’s inspirational call to arms in 1940 when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany: “We shall fight on the beaches ... in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”<br /><br />From Churchillian defiance to “run, hide, and phone a friend.” Lord help us. You could be forgiven for thinking that the U.K. was already occupied by ISIS. Small wonder that the nation’s commuters lambasted the police for scaremongering and wasting taxpayers money.<br /><br />If that wasn’t enough, we then had the astonishing verdict of a parliamentary inquiry that found an American social media website responsible for the brutal murder of a British soldier on the streets of London last year by two Islamist terrorists. This shamelessly passed the buck that should have stopped at the British intelligence services, which had monitored the killers over several years.<br /><br />Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said the website, later revealed to be Facebook, failed to inform the authorities that one of the killers, Michael Adebowale, wrote of his murderous intentions on Facebook six months before he and an accomplice, Michael Adebolajo, killed army drummer Lee Rigby in May 2013 and attempted to behead him.<br /><br />Facebook had closed some of Adebowale’s accounts after its automated systems flagged up terrorist concerns, but Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the chairman of the ISC and a former British foreign secretary, insisted that if MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, had had access to this information there was “a significant possibility that MI5 would have been able to prevent the attack.” Rifkind accused Facebook of providing a “safe haven for terrorists,” adding that the murder “happened on this U.S. Internet company’s watch.”<br /><br />In actual fact, the murder happened on the British government’s watch, and that of increasingly hapless intelligence services.<br /><br />Rifkind’s diatribe served two purposes. First, it was a crude attempt to deflect attention from a string of failings by MI5 and MI6 that were highlighted in the ISC report. Second, it paved the way for the government’s sweeping new anti-terror laws, which give police draconian powers to force Internet firms to hand over details that might identify suspected terrorists and other criminals. The legislation was unveiled at the same time as the ISC report was made public.<br /><br />The ISC exonerated MI5 and MI6 yet its report lays bare how much the intelligence services knew about the killers, both of whom are British citizens and are now serving life sentences.<br /><br />Adebolajo, the leader of the attack, had been the subject of five separate investigations and surveillance operations by MI5. In 2010 he was arrested in Kenya while traveling to Somalia to join Al-Shabab. MI6, Britain’s overseas security service, was notified of the arrest but failed to interview Adebolajo or even sit in on the Kenyan interviews. While the ISC was scathing in its criticism of Facebook, it merely said MI6’s failure to follow up on the Kenyan arrest was “deeply unsatisfactory.”<br /><br />For the next two years Adebolajo was under intensive MI5 surveillance, then inexplicably, a month or so before the murder, it stopped. It has been claimed that around this time MI5 was trying to recruit him as an informant.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the other killer, Adebowale, had been investigated on two occasions. MI5 had even decided to start a new intensive “intrusive” surveillance operation against him in the weeks before the murder. However, it delayed seeking the required legal permission from the home secretary until the day before Rigby was killed.<br /><br />In short, the report’s findings clearly indicate that better intelligence work and more decisive action by both agencies would have reduced the danger posed by these men, perhaps even saved Rigby’s life. But the ICS ignored its own findings and heaped opprobrium on Facebook instead.<br /><br />This isn’t the first time the security services have escaped condemnation for their failings. A government inquiry into the July 7, 2005, bombings in London also absolved MI5, despite the fact the leaders of the attack, which killed 52 people, were, in the parlance of the spooks, “known” to the service.<br /><br />While everyone needs to be vigilant against terror threats, it is surely not the responsibility of Internet companies to intercept individual emails. Even the security services are only supposed to be able do so when backed by a warrant, issued by the home secretary in the U.K. and by a judge in the United States.<br /><br />But, as the ISC revealed, the security services did not seek a warrant until it was too late. If MI5 didn’t think the killers’ Internet activity needed monitoring, why should Facebook?<br /><br />The rush to blame Facebook, and further invade Internet privacy, will merely drive terrorists to find other ways to communicate. The rush to strike fear into commuters with miserable, shameful, leaflets will convince the terrorists that they are succeeding in terrorizing the country. And the sordid rush to implement a litany of heavy-handed, coercive measures in the shape of the government’s anti-terror legislation is a victory for paranoia and fear over calm heads and leadership.<br /><br />What the government and the ISC should be doing is asking whether this constant corrosion of our civil liberties would be needed at all if the intelligence services just did their job properly in the first place.<br /><i><br />Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 02, 2014, on page 7.</i><br />Michael Glackinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06180597266103156153noreply@blogger.com0